http://www.eugeneengland.org
Fri, 28 Apr 2017 16:44:05 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.10“Remembering Gene” Projecthttp://www.eugeneengland.org/remembering-gene-project
http://www.eugeneengland.org/remembering-gene-project#commentsTue, 26 Jun 2012 12:48:57 +0000http://www.eugeneengland.org/?p=1313A DECADE HAS passed since we heard Gene teach a class, or saw him hop the rocks of a stream to look for German browns, or watched him play an exuberant game of tennis, or danced with him around the kitchen, or joined him in a tenacious game of steal the flag.

Soon after Gene died, stories about him came to me from friends—stories that were so intriguing I wanted to preserve them for the person who would write his biography. A close friend suggested I collect more stories and let Gene’s life unfold through the eyes of his friends and family. I realized that if I didn’t do as he counseled, these stories would be lost.

Following up on this suggestion, I invited a few close friends and family members to contribute to a collection of recollections, memories, or anecdotes of their experiences with Gene. Dozens of stories came in, each one a unique perspective on Gene from that person—individuals who knew Gene in his childhood, at college, in the air force, and throughout his life. I like the stories so much and want to share them with you.

I am so grateful to all those who encouraged me in this project and walked me through new territory that sometimes felt like finding my way through a mine field. Thank you to Dan Wotherspoon for some editing and arranging to make it all work well for the reader, and a deep gratitude to my daughter Rebecca and her husband Jordan for their financial contribution to set up the website, giving a home to all the essays.

And I am forever grateful to those who were willing and eager to share their stories with all of us. This collection couldn’t have happened without each one of you. I hope these stories help you know Gene even better and that you enjoy some of the surprises along the way.

We invite comments and additional stories from any of you would like to contribute one!

]]>http://www.eugeneengland.org/remembering-gene-project/feed2A Professor and Apostle Correspond: Eugene England and Bruce R. McConkie on the Nature of Godhttp://www.eugeneengland.org/a-professor-and-apostle-correspond-eugene-england-and-bruce-r-mcconkie-on-the-nature-of-god
http://www.eugeneengland.org/a-professor-and-apostle-correspond-eugene-england-and-bruce-r-mcconkie-on-the-nature-of-god#commentsMon, 25 Jun 2012 10:45:25 +0000http://www.eugeneengland.org/?p=1282We must truly listen to each other, respecting our essential brotherhood and the courage of those who try to speak, however they may differ from us in professional standing or religious belief or moral vision . . . and then our dialogue can serve both in truth and charity.

—Eugene England, 1966

It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.

—Bruce R. McConkie, 1981

One of the most troubled times of my life came about when I failed to make the distinction between Brother and Brethren.

—Eugene England, 1993

_____________________

IN LATE MAY 1981, Professor Eugene England returned to the BYU London Centre after spending the previous month directing Study Abroad students traveling on the European continent as part of their six-month coursework. He was still unsettled by the shocking experience of witnessing just days earlier the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II’s life in St. Peter’s Square. These were the circumstances during which he found in his stack of unopened mail a ten-page letter from Elder Bruce R. McConkie that began: “This may well be the most important letter you have or will receive.” Dated19 February 1981, the letter was Elder McConkie’s response to a letter and essay England had sent to the apostle on 1 September 1980.

Three decades later, McConkie’s letter to England is closely associated with these two influential Mormon intellectuals. When someone enters a Google search for either “Eugene England” or “Bruce R. McConkie,” links to websites containing the full text of McConkie’s notorious letter appear at or near the top of the list. According to historian Claudia Bushman, “a microcosm of the diverging styles” of faithful Church intellectuals can be seen in this “celebrated showdown between England, a provocative thinker . . . and McConkie, a lawyer and doctrinaire General Authority.” She believes the “McConkie-England disagreement revealed the division between theological conservatives and liberals within the believing camp and, in a larger sense, the tension between authoritarian control versus free expression.”1

Because copies were widely circulated, McConkie’s 1981 letter has impacted many people beyond just England, including his family, friends, and many Latter-day Saints who felt that Elder McConkie’s authoritarian and threatening tone was unbefitting an apostle of Jesus Christ. Others saw the McConkie letter as an expression of one of the Lord’s anointed apostles acting fully in harmony with his calling, which includes correcting—even with sharpness—ideas that might be harmful to faith. A prolific personal essayist, England never spoke or wrote publicly about the controversy except for a few paragraphs in his 1993 essay, “On Spectral Evidence.” However, documents found in England’s papers help reconstruct and give context to this remarkable exchange between a Latter-day Saint professor and apostle.

ON 13 SEPTEMBER 1979, Professor England was scheduled to speak to BYU honors students. His talk—“The Lord’s University?”—would address the Latter-day Saint ideal of continuing, life-long education through a review of, among other examples, the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression in knowledge. It would also include an invitation for the audience to respond to Joseph Smith’s optimistic view of unlimited human potential in relation to divinity as expressed in his last major sermon, the King Follett Discourse. The evening before the scheduled lecture, England received a phone call at home from Joseph Fielding McConkie, a BYU religion professor. Professor McConkie had read an earlier version of “The Lord’s University?” and told England he thought his father, Elder Bruce R. McConkie, would strongly disapprove of its content. After a lengthy conversation, England invited Professor McConkie to the lecture so he could share with the audience what he felt his father’s objections might be. After hanging up the phone, England discussed the conversation with his wife, Charlotte, who expressed her concern that the interaction could become negative and advised against inviting McConkie to participate. England, however, thought it would be beneficial for students to see the respectful exchange by faculty members of differing opinions.2

After giving his lecture, England invited Joseph McConkie to respond. In his response, McConkie stated that his father, Elder McConkie, and grandfather Joseph Fielding Smith, taught of a god that is not progressing and whose perfection is absolute. “Though I accord a man the privilege of worshipping what he may, there is a line—a boundary—a point at which he and his views are no longer welcome.” Joseph concluded: “I do not see the salvation of BYU in the abandonment of absolutes, and with the prophets whose blood flows in my veins, I refuse to worship at the shrine of an ignorant God.”3 As audience members sat stunned at the combative and superior tone of Professor McConkie’s remarks, England attempted to ease the tension in the crowded lecture hall and restore collegiality by expressing his appreciation for Brother McConkie’s response and acknowledging the educational value for students to hear such an open and honest exchange of ideas.

This Eugene England and Joseph McConkie exchange might have remained a much-discussed disagreement between BYU professors that would fade with memory. However, nine months later, on 1 June 1980, Elder Bruce R. McConkie delivered at a BYU Devotional, a lecture entitled “The Seven Deadly Heresies.” The primary “heresy” Elder McConkie warned against was the belief that “God is progressing in knowledge and is learning new truth. This is false, utterly, totally, and completely.” He further stated that we cannot be saved unless we believe that the “truth as revealed to and taught by the Prophet Joseph Smith is that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.” McConkie belittled those who think otherwise as having “the intellect of an ant and the understanding of a clod of miry clay in a primordial swamp.”4

President Kimball was not doctrinaire, and he felt a need to interfere in doctrinal matters only when he saw strong statements of personal opinion as being divisive. Elder McConkie’s talk at BYU on “The Seven Deadly Heresies” implied he had authority to define heresy. . . . President Kimball responded to the uproar [caused by the devotional] by calling Elder McConkie in to discuss the talk. As a consequence, Elder McConkie revised the talk for publication so as to clarify that he was stating personal views and not official Church doctrine.5

This was not the first or last time that Elder McConkie would be quietly corrected by a Church president for causing controversy and division. For generations, Latter-day Saints have cited Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine as an authoritative source of official Church doctrine. However, its unauthorized publication in 1958 met with strong disapproval and objections by President David O. McKay, the First Presidency, and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. At the direction of President McKay, an analysis of the book by two apostles noted its many doctrinal errors, offensive statements, and overly authoritative tone. President McKay directed that the book not be republished and that it be repudiated. Elder McConkie also was privately reprimanded by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve for his problematic publication.6 However, few students or faculty were aware that Church prophets and authorities ever disapproved of and required corrections of Elder McConkie’s spoken or written words. Many did not distinguish his opinion from official Church doctrine; others found McConkie’s statements contradicting other Church leaders confusing.

England considered McConkie’s “Seven Deadly Heresies” talk, along with other writings and sermons by Church leaders, and drafted a new paper, “The Perfection and Progression of God: Two Spheres of Existence and Two Modes of Discourse.” Then, on 1 September 1980, England typed a letter to McConkie on his home office Underwood manual typewriter. In taking this step to share his concerns privately with Elder McConkie, England hoped to avoid public controversy and find McConkie more open-minded in personal conversation than what was suggested by his public rhetoric. In his “Bruce R. McConkie” file, Eugene kept a copy of “All Are Alike unto God,” an address McConkie gave soon after the 1978 revelation on the priesthood, in which Elder McConkie admits to having misinterpreted the scriptures and statements of previous prophets: “Forget everything that I [and others] have said . . . contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding.”

During his life and career, England had personally known, sought counsel from, and received the support of a number of Church leaders whom he held in high regard. He and Charlotte had especially positive associations with Hugh B. Brown, Marion D. Hanks, Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball, and David B. Haight. Never having personally interacted with Elder McConkie, England begins his letter by expressing warmth and admiration for the apostle, especially his testimony of Jesus Christ: “I was especially moved by your witness and psalm of praise in last April conference.” After briefly recounting the disagreement with his son Joseph the previous year, he explains why he is writing now to the apostle:

After last fall’s lecture, I got a copy of your son’s response, studied it carefully, and decided that his strong feeling that I was out of harmony required that I rethink the whole matter. So I have, this past year, carefully and prayerfully gone back over all the pertinent sources I could find and have written the enclosed paper about my findings. . . . But I recognize that I could certainly be wrong, that I could be interpreting Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and others incorrectly, or that subsequent revelation has invalidated what they said. I accept the authority of the living prophets and not only want to be but assume I am fully in harmony with them, including, of course, with you. If not, I want to be put right.

It would be gracious of you to read my paper and give me some response if you feel there is need. If you have any question about my ability or good faith before you take the time to read my work, you could check with Elder Boyd K. Packer or Elder David B. Haight, both of whom know well my mind and spirit.

In January 1981, England began the aforementioned six-month assignment as Associate Director for BYU London Study Abroad, so he was out of the country when Elder McConkie eventually wrote a response. Before England had even received McConkie’s letter or knew of its existence, however, copies that had originated from the apostle’s office were already circulating on the BYU Provo campus.

After stating, “This may well be the most important letter you have or will receive,” McConkie acknowledges the receipt of England’s letter and the enclosed paper. He briefly summarizes the contents, states he does not participate in discussions of controversial subjects, but had eventually decided, partly out of respect for Eugene’s parents, to answer England’s letter. “I shall write in kindness and in plainness and perhaps with sharpness. I want you to know that I am extending to you the hand of fellowship though I hold over you at the same time, the scepter of judgment.”

Long passages of the letter consist of quotes from McConkie’s own speeches and state his opposition to the idea of a god who progresses and his fear that such a concept could lead to questions that undermine faith: “Will [God] one day learn something that will destroy the plan of salvation and turn man and the universe into uncreated nothingness?”

In his response, McConkie also makes several statements about Brigham Young that would eventually catch the attention of anti-Mormon groups, who regularly quote the letter. McConkie says that while Brigham Young was a prophet, he did not always speak as a prophet and sometimes “expressed views that are out of harmony with the gospel” [and] “erred in some of his statements on the nature and kind of being that God is. . . . What [Brigham Young] did is not a pattern for any of us. If we choose to believe and teach the false portions of his doctrines, we are making an election that will damn us.”

After directing England to cease speaking on the subject of the progression of God or sharing copies of his paper on the subject, McConkie emphatically states: “It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”

McConkie then expresses his expectation that if England is “receptive and pliable,” he will “get the message.” He follows with a prayer for his well-being and an invitation to visit privately in his office if England so desired, but he then adds what is hard to interpret as anything other than a dig: “Perhaps I should tell you what one of the very astute and alert General Authorities said to me when I chanced to mention to him the subject of your letter to me. He said: ‘Oh dear, haven’t we rescued him enough times already.’”

The letter closes with an additional warning to England that his soul’s salvation depends on accepting the apostle’s counsel: “It is not too often in this day that any of us are told plainly and bluntly what ought to be. I am taking the liberty of so speaking to you at this time, and become thus a witness against you if you do not take the counsel.”

DISTRESSED UPON REALIZING that an apostle saw him as a nuisance and potential heretic, as well as that a sensitive, private letter had been made public, England soon wrote a letter to clear up misunderstandings and assure McConkie that he wrote sincerely asking for McConkie’s judgment of his efforts to build faith in his students by harmonizing apparent differences in prophetic statements on the nature of God, and that he would “obey his directions exactly.” Most of England’s friends and family were unaware of his struggle to respond with integrity to McConkie’s letter of reprimand.

Upon his return to Utah from London, other priorities emerged, allowing the heartache caused by these exchanges with the apostle to fade into the background. England became fully engaged in other activities, such as founding the non-profit charity Food for Poland, continuing to develop and teach the BYU freshman honors colloquium, teaching Shakespeare and American and Mormon literature, writing scholarly and personal essays, assisting Charlotte in caring for her dying mother in their Provo home, and serving as bishop of a BYU young married students’ ward.

Shortly after the controversy over the letter began to subside, another incident occurred on the BYU campus that stirred up similar feelings about the way Elder McConkie would sometimes choose to exercise his right as an apostle to correct what he saw as false doctrine or practices that could potentially prove harmful to faith. The catalyst for this renewed stir was a 2 March 1982 televised speech in which McConkie publicly censured popular BYU religion professor George W. Pace (and a colleague of his son, Joseph F. McConkie) for teaching his views about the importance of developing a personal relationship with the Savior, Jesus Christ. Following this talk, McConkie again received private counsel and correction from President Spencer W. Kimball. In response to McConkie’s rebuke, Pace, a longtime friend and colleague of England’s since the 1960s when they had taught together at the Stanford University LDS Institute of Religion, publicly apologized and stopped teaching and writing about developing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

England decided to engage Elder McConkie later that year, not over the Pace censure but because he had learned that the McConkie letter to him had been recently published by disaffected Mormons Jerald and Sandra Tanner, who had taken special interest in the apostle’s candid statements about President Brigham Young’s having at times taught false doctrine. In a short 29 October 1982 letter to McConkie, England reassures the apostle that he has secured the original letter McConkie sent to him and hadnever released a copy. “Perhaps you should know that I have learned recently that a copy of your letter was seen here at Brigham Young University just a few days after it was written, in early 1981 and long before I received the letter in England. It was understood that the copy had somehow originated in your office.” He also regrets the ripples of controversy surrounding their interchange “over what I have consistently intended and felt was an honest and faithful pursuit of truth and understanding. It is still not entirely clear what lessons I have learned, but I am sincerely trying. May the Lord continue to bless you in your powerful work as a special witness of Christ.”

AS HE HAD promised the apostle, England did not publicly teach his beliefs about God being both perfect and progressing until four years after Elder McConkie’s death. (In this way, he honored the apostle’s counsel: “It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”) Feeling he was no longer bound to follow McConkie’s counsel of silence, England published “Perfection and Progression: Two Complementary Ways to Talk About God” in the 1989 summer issue of BYU Studies. The acceptance of this essay in BYU Studies is, itself, a recognition by editors faithful to the church that the two views of God co-exist within Mormon thought and are worth at least considering and attempting to reconcile.

In his 1993 essay “On Spectral Evidence,” England looks back on the controversy surrounding McConkie’s letter. In it, England begins to give shape to those “not entirely clear” lessons he was to have been learning from his interactions with Elder McConkie, wondering out loud if he may have violated his own integrity by so readily promising to be silent when faced with McConkie’s reprimand.

Certainly it is possible for an individual among the Brethren to ask me to do or believe something I simply could not, at least in good conscience. As Elder Boyd K. Packer explained in a devotional address at BYU in 1991, safety lies in the motto, “Follow the Brethren, not the Brother.”7

Using that idea as a springboard, England reflects on “one of the most troubled times of [his] life [when he] failed to make the distinction between Brother and Brethren” and reviews his intentions in contacting McConkie, along with his feelings of hurt and bewilderment at the apostle’s harsh response. He then reflects further on his promise of silence, his efforts to be obedient and open-hearted toward this general authority, his concerns about publicity, and his eventual decision to break his silence after McConkie’s death.

It was certainly not my prerogative to publicly challenge or oppose Elder McConkie’s ideas, especially while he was serving as an apostle. But neither did it any longer seem right for me to remain silent about what I understood to be an important and official teaching of the Restoration affecting the education of my students, so in 1989 I published an essay in Brigham Young University Studies, exploring as objectively as possible two complementary ways of talking about God—as perfect and as progressing.

Throughout the remainder of his life, England consistently taught what he saw as a unique Mormon theological teaching of a perfect and progressing God, but he always remained respectful of the diversity of opinion on the subject. Perhaps England’s most eloquent presentation of his views on the paradoxical nature of a being both perfect and progressing is found in one of his final essays, “The Weeping God of Mormonism.” There, England harmonizes a way of honoring Elder McConkie’s concern about people possibly losing faith if they were to believe in a Deity who was other than “omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.” Commenting on differences between theological positions presented in the “Lectures on Faith,” an early doctrinal exploration, and Joseph Smith’s later views, England writes:

I think [Joseph Smith] eventually saw no inherent contradiction between the Lectures and his later understanding of God as having “all” knowledge and power, sufficient to provide us salvation in our sphere of existence (and thus being “infinite”), but also as one who is still learning and developing in relationship to higher spheres of existence (and thus “finite”). God is thus, as Joseph understood, redemptivelysovereign, not absolute in every way, but absolutely able to save us.

INDIVIDUAL TEMPERAMENT RATHER than logical argument may ultimately cause one individual to believe in an unchanging God with absolute knowledge and limitless power and another to be drawn to a more personal God limited by natural laws and somehow progressing in knowledge. As noted earlier, Claudia Bushman suggests that in many ways Eugene England and Bruce R. McConkie represent the liberal and conservative strains of orthodox Mormon intellectuals. In his attempts to describe and continue this dialectic in Mormon theology, Eugene England valued and invited dialogue between different perspectives rather than rushing to settle debates about the nature of God. Confident in the reality and benevolence of God, England concludes his 1989 BYU Studies essay on the nature of God by embracing adventure and a degree of risk in an open universe without end. In contrast, Elder McConkie felt no reservations at claiming authority to define and declare gospel truth. His testimony was of God’s omniscience and omnipotence, and he unhesitatingly warned his audiences to adopt his views or risk straying into apostasy. One approach invites dialogue; the other silences dissent.

When questioned by his family, colleagues, and students about his thoughts and feelings surrounding Elder McConkie, England was consistently and remarkably sympathetic and respectful of the apostle. His children have no recollections of their father expressing bitterness toward Elder McConkie, or any other apostle. Immediately following the broadcast of the April 1985 General Conference in which Elder McConkie gave what turned out to be his final talk before his death thirteen days later, England commented on how moving he found Elder McConkie’s personal testimony of the Savior.

Online discussions reveal that curiosity about the England and McConkie exchange has not waned in the three decades since it took place, as it raises important questions about the rights and responsibilities of individuals as they relate to religious authority. Many individuals take sides, severely faulting either England or McConkie. Some assume England must have grievously erred to receive such a stern rebuke from an apostle; others find McConkie’s counsel harsh, heretical, arrogant, and even spiritually abusive.

What clearly emerges in the exchange, however, is that both England and McConkie saw themselves as defenders of the faith—loyal believers with profound testimonies of Jesus Christ and the restored gospel. As Latter-day Saint intellectuals obviously committed to their faith, England and McConkie were nevertheless near opposites in their temperaments and approaches to paradoxical positions. In this instance, the correspondents were concerned with the Latter-day Saint understanding of the nature of God. The differences between England and McConkie bring to mind the conflicts between Brigham Young and Orson Pratt recounted in Gary James Bergera’s Conflict in the Quorum,8 with England favoring Young’s position on a progressing God and McConkie siding with Orson Pratt on God’s absolute perfection. Yet underlying their exchange is the more general conflict between one BYU professor’s desire to engage in and expand discussion and one authority figure’s opposition to open-ended exploration and its potential to damage the kind of faith he felt was necessary to have for salvation. Both desires emerged from these men’s concern for others and, hence, deserve being honored in that spirit.

In 2001, seven weeks before his brain cancer was finally diagnosed and when he was struggling with severe anxiety, depression, and physical discomfort, England wrote a journal entry he titled “The Voices I Hear.” He included as eighteenth in a list of nineteen voices—those of family members, friends, university administrators, and Church leaders—Elder Bruce R. McConkie, along with a line paraphrasing the famous one in the 1981 letter: “My job is to define doctrine. Your job is either to support what I say or be quiet.” During this period of depression and anxiety that was so uncharacteristic of him, England occasionally wondered if he was experiencing the effects of unresolved anger about his forced retirement from BYU in 1998, and he also privately commented to a few close friends his utter bewilderment at the poor treatment he had received from some apostles, whom he continued to sustain as inspired servants of God. Following the diagnosis of his brain cancer and removal of the malignant tumors, though he was dramatically limited physically and mentally, England regained his characteristic optimism and faced his death unburdened by past regrets and unreservedly expressing his core beliefs and love to friends and family.

_____________________

Human beings cannot be reduced to an action, a political or intellectual position, a quotation in a newspaper, an essay or a story they have written…. We are never less—and actually much more because of our infinite potential—than the complete sum of our history, our stories, a sum which is constantly increasing, changing, through time.

]]>http://www.eugeneengland.org/a-professor-and-apostle-correspond-eugene-england-and-bruce-r-mcconkie-on-the-nature-of-god/feed46Why the Church Is As True As the Gospelhttp://www.eugeneengland.org/why-the-church-is-as-true-as-the-gospel
http://www.eugeneengland.org/why-the-church-is-as-true-as-the-gospel#commentsMon, 25 Jun 2012 03:04:33 +0000http://www.eugeneengland.org/?p=790I WAS CONVINCED when I was a youth that the most boring meeting in the Church, perhaps in the world, was a quarterly stake conference. In those days, they were held every three months and included at least two, two-hour sessions on Sunday. The most interesting highlights to us children were the quavery songs literally “rendered” by the “Singing Mothers” and the sober sustaining of the stake No Liquor-Tobacco Committee.

But one conference was particularly memorable. I was twelve and sitting near the front because my father was being sustained as a high councilor in a newly formed stake. I had just turned around in my seat to tease my sister, who was sit­ting behind me, when I felt something, vaguely familiar, burning at the center of my heart and bones and then almost physically turning me around to look at the transfigured face of Apostle Harold B. Lee, the “visiting authority.” He had sud­denly interrupted his prepared sermon and was giving the new stake an apostolic blessing. And I became aware, for a second and confirming time in my life, of the presence of the Holy Ghost and the special witness of Jesus Christ. How many boring stake conferences would I attend to be even once in the presence of such grace? Thousands—all there are. That pearl is without price. And because I have since learned better what to look for and find there—not doctrinal revelation so much as understanding of and experience with the members of the Church—the conferences are no longer boring. Thus, one of the earliest and most important pillars of my faith came not through some great insight into the gospel but through an ex­perience I could only have had because I was doing my duty in the Church, however immaturely.

About this Article

This classic essay makes the case for the Church being as (or even more) important than the gospel for our salvation because of its role as a “school of love.” It serves us this way by forcing us to interact with and giving us opportunities to learn to love those we might otherwise never choose to associate with. The earliest version of this essay was presented at the 1985 Sunstone symposium in Salt Lake City and then later published in Sunstone 10, no. 10 (March 1986), which version is also available through this website. The version below is a reprint of that essay but contains an additional short reflection England wrote fourteen years later as it was being prepared for republication in the Sunstone 25th anniversary issue.

Yet one cliche Mormons often repeat is that while the gospel is true, even perfect, the Church is, after all, a human instru­ment, historybound, and therefore understandably imper­fect—something to be endured for the sake of the gospel Nevertheless, I am persuaded by experiences like that one at a stake conference and by my best thinking that, in fact, the Church is as “true,” as effective, as sure an instrument of salva­tion as the system of doctrines we call the gospel—and that is so in good part because of the very flaws, human exaspera­tions, and historical problems that occasionally give us all some anguish.

I know that those who use the cliche about the gospel being more “true” than the Church want the term gospel to mean a perfect system of revealed commandments based in principles that infallibly express the natural laws of the universe. But even revelation is, in fact, merely the best understanding the Lord can give us of those things. And, as God himself has clearly insisted, that understanding is far from perfect. He re­minds us, in the first section of the Doctrine and Covenants, “Behold, I am God and have spoken it; these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding. And inasmuch as they erred it might be made known” (D&C1:24-25). This is a remarkably complete and sobering inventory of the problems involved in putting God’s knowledge of the universe into human language and then having it understood. It should make us careful about claiming too much for “the gospel,” which is not the perfect principles or natural laws themselves—or God’s perfect knowledge of those things—but is merely the closest approximation that in­spired but limited mortals can receive.

Even after a revelation is received and expressed by a prophet, it has to be understood, taught, translated into other languages, and expressed in programs, manuals, sermons, and essays—in a word, interpreted. And that means that at least one more set of limitations of language and world-view enters in. I always find it perplexing when someone asks a teacher or speaker if what she is saying is the pure gospel or merely her own interpretation. Everything anyone says is essentially an in­terpretation. Even simply reading the scriptures to others in­volves interpretation, in choosing both what to read in a par­ticular circumstance and how to read it (tone and emphasis). Beyond that point, anything we do becomes less and less “au­thoritative” as we move into explication and application of the scriptures, that is, as we teach “the gospel.”

Yes, I know that the Holy Ghost can give strokes of pure in­telligence to the speaker and bear witness of truth to the hearer. I have experienced both of these lovely, reassuring gifts. But such gifts, which guarantee the overall guidance of the Church in the way the Lord intends and provide guidance, often of a remarkably clear nature, to individuals, still do not override individuality and agency. They are not exempt from the limitations of human language and moral perception that the Lord describes in the passage quoted above, and thus they cannot impose universal acceptance and understanding.

This problem is compounded by the fundamentally para­doxical nature of the universe itself and thus of the true laws and principles that the gospel uses to describe the universe. Lehi’s law, “It must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Ne. 2:11), is perhaps the most provocative and pro­found statement of abstract theology in the scriptures, because it presumes to describe what is most ultimate in the uni­verse—even beyond God. In context, it clearly suggests that not only is contradiction and opposition a natural pan of human experience, something God uses for his redemptive purposes, but also that opposition is at the very heart of things; it is intrinsic to the two most fundamental realities—intelli­gence and matter, what Lehi calls “things to act and things to be acted upon.” According to Lehi, opposition provides the universe with energy and meaning, even makes possible the existence of God and everything else: Without it, “all things must have vanished away” (2 Ne.2:13).

So, as we know it in human terms, the “gospel” is not—and perhaps, given the paradoxical nature of the universe itself, cannot ever be—a simple and clear set of unequivocal propositions.

We all know from experience the consequences for mortal life of this fundamental, eternal truth about reality. Throughout history, the most important and productive ideas have been paradoxical; the energizing force in all an has been conflict and opposition; the basis for success in all economic, political, and other social development has been competition and dialogue. Think of the U.S.federal system of checks and balances and a two-party political system (which together make pluralistic democracy pos­sible), or of Romanticism and Classicism, reason and emotion, freedom and order, individual and community, men and women (whose differences make eternal in­crease possible), justice and mercy (whose opposition makes our re­demption through the “At Onement” possible). Life in this uni­verse is full of polarities and is made full by them; we struggle with them, complain about them, even try sometimes to destroy them with dogmatism or self-righteousness, or retreat into the innocence that is only ignorance, a return to the Garden of Eden where there is de­ceptive ease and clarity but no salva­tion. William Blake, the prophetic poet, taught that “without contraries is no existence,” and warned that “whoever tries to reconcile [the con­traries] seeks to destroy existence.” Whatever it means that we will eventually see “face to face,” now we can see only “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor.13:12), and we had better make the best of it. So, as we know it in human terms, the “gospel” is not—and perhaps, given the paradoxical nature of the universe itself, cannot ever be—a simple and clear set of unequivocal propositions.

The Church is true because it is concrete, not theoretical; in all its contradictions and problems, it is at least as productive of good as is the gospel.

And that is where the Church comes in. I believe it is the best medium, apart from marriage (which it much resembles in this respect), for grappling constructively with the opposi­tions of existence. 1 believe that the better any church or organization is at such grappling, the “truer” it is. And I believe we can accurately call the LDS church “the true Church” only if we mean it is the best organized method for doing that and is made and kept so by revelations that have come and continue to come from God, however “darkly” they of necessity emerge.

Martin Luther, with prophetic perception, wrote, “Marriage is the school of love”—that is, marriage is not the home or the result of love so much as the school. I believe that any good church is a school of love and that the LDS church, for most people, perhaps all, is the best one, the “only true and living Church” (D&C 1:30)—not just because its doctrines teach and embody some of the great and central paradoxes but, more im­portant, because the Church provides the best context for struggling with, working through, enduring, and being re­deemed by those paradoxes and oppositions that give energy and meaning to the universe. Just before his death, Joseph Smith, also with prophetic perception, wrote, “By proving con­traries, truth is made manifest.”1 By “prove” he meant not only to demonstrate logically but to test, to struggle with, and to work out in practical experience. The Church is as true—as ef­fective—as the gospel because it involves us directly in proving contraries, working constructively with the opposi­tions within ourselves and especially between people, strug­gling with paradoxes and polarities at an experiential level that can redeem us. The Church is true because it is concrete, not theoretical; in all its contradictions and problems, it is at least as productive of good as is the gospel.

WHY OPPOSITIONS IN THE CHURCH ARE PRODUCTIVEThey push us toward a new kind of being.

LETUS CONSIDER why this is so. In the life of the true Church, there are constant opportunities for all to serve, especially to learn to serve people we would not nor­mally choose to serve—or possibly even associate with—and thus opportunities to learn to love unconditionally. There is constant encouragement, even pressure, to be “active”: to have a calling” and thus to have to grapple with relationships and management, with other peoples ideas and wishes, their feel­ings and failures; to attend classes and meetings and to have to listen to other people’s sometimes misinformed or prejudiced notions and to have to make some constructive response; to have leaders and occasionally to be hurt by their weakness and blindness, even unrighteous dominion; and then to be made a leader and find that you, too, with all the best intentions, can be weak and blind and unrighteous. Church involvement teaches us compassion and patience as well as courage and dis­cipline. It makes us responsible for the personal and marital, physical, and spiritual welfare of people we may not already love (or may even heartily dislike), and thus we learn to love them. It stretches and challenges us, though disappointed and exasperated, in ways we would not otherwise choose to be— and thus gives us a chance to be made better than we might choose to be, but ultimately need and want to be.

Michael Novak, the lay Catholic theologian, has made this same point concerning marriage. In a remarkable essay pub­lished in the April 1976 Harper’s, he reviewed the increasing inclination of modern intellectuals to resist, desert, and even to attack marriage, arguing that the main reason the family, which has traditionally been the bulwark of economic and emotional security, is currently “out of favor” is that many modem opinion-makers are unwilling to take the risks and subject themselves to the disciplines that the school of marriage re­quires. But he then points out how such fears, though justi­fied, keep them from meeting their own greatest needs. Similarly, 1 believe that those who resist, desert, and attack the Church often fail, from a simple lack of perspective, to see their own best interest. As you read this passage from Novak, substitute the Church for marriage:

Marriage [the Church] is an assault upon the lonely, atomic ego. Marriage is a threat to the solitary indi­vidual. Marriage does impose grueling, humbling, baf­fling, and frustrating responsibilities. Yet if one sup­poses that precisely such things are the preconditions for all true liberation, marriage is not the enemy of moral development in adults. Quite the opposite.

Being married and having children [being active in the Church] has impressed on my mind certain lessons, for whose learning I cannot help being grateful. Most are lessons of difficulty and duress. Most of what I am forced to learn about myself is not pleasant. . . . My dignity as a human being depends perhaps more on what sort of husband and parent [Church member] I am, than on any professional work I am called on to do. My bonds to my family [my church] hold me back (and my wife even more) from many sorts of opportunities. And yet these do not feel like bonds. They are, I know, my liberation. They force me to be a different sort of human being, in a way in which I want and need to be forced.

I bear witness that the Church can do those same frustrating, humbling, but ultimately liberating and redeeming things for us—if we can learn to see it as Novak does marriage, if we can see that its assaults on our lonely egos, and the bonds and re­sponsibilities that we willingly accept, can push us toward new-kinds of being in a way we most deeply want and need to be pushed.

Two keys to this paradoxical power in the LDS church are, first, that it is, by revelation, a lay church and radically so— more than any other—and, second, that it organizes its con­gregations geographically, rather than by choice. I know that there are exceptions, but the basic Church experience of al­most all Mormons brings them directly and constantly into po­tentially powerful relationships with a range of people and problems in their assigned congregation that are not primarily of their own choosing but are profoundly redemptive in po­tential, in part because they are not consciously chosen. Yes, the ordinances performed through the Church are important, as are its scriptural texts and moral exhortations and spiritual conduits. But even these, in my experience, are powerful and redemptive because they embody profound, life-giving oppo­sitions and work harmoniously with those oppositions through the Church structure to give truth and meaning to the religious life of Mormons.

Let me illustrate: In one of his very last messages, during a Saturday evening priesthood session. Church President David O. McKay gave a kind of final testament that was a bit shocking to many of us who are conditioned to expect that prophets have no trouble getting divine manifestations. He told how he struggled in vain all through his teenage years to get God “to declare to me the truth of his revelation to Joseph Smith.” He prayed “fervently and sincerely” in the hills and at home, but had to admit to himself constantly, “No spiritual manifestation has come to me.” But he continued to seek truth and to serve others in the context of Mormonism, including going on a mission toBritain, mainly because of trust in his parents and in the goodness of his own Church experience. Finally, as President McKay put it,

the spiritual manifestation for which I had prayed as a boy in my teens came as a natural sequence to the performance of duty. For, as the apostle John de­clared, “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether 1 speak of myself” (John 7:17).

Following a series of meetings at the conference held in Glasgow, Scotland, was a most remarkable priesthood meeting. I remember, as if it were yes­terday, the intensity of the inspiration of that occa­sion. Everybody felt the rich outpouring of the Spirit of the Lord. All present were truly of one heart and one mind. Never before had I ex­perienced such an emotion. It was a manifestation for which as a doubting youth I had secretly prayed most earnestly on hillside and in meadow. . . .

During the progress of the meeting, an elder on his own initiative arose and said, “Brethren, there are angels in this room.” Strange as it may seem, the announcement was not startling; indeed, it seemed wholly proper, though it had not occurred to me that there were divine beings present, I only knew that I was overflowing with gratitude for the presence of the Holy Spirit.2

I have had many confirmations of President McKay’s prophetic witness in that sermon. Most of my profound spir­itual manifestations, those that have provided the rock-bottom convictions I have about the reality of God and Christ and their divine work, as well as my most troubling, soul-searching moral struggles with the great human issues of per­sonal integrity versus public responsibility, loyalty to self versus loyalty to community, redemptive freedom versus re­demptive structure—all these have come, as President McKay affirms, “as a natural sequence to the performance of duty” in the Church.

I know God has been found by unusual people in unusual places—in a sudden vision in a grove or orchard or grotto, or on a mountain or in a closet, or through saintly service to African lepers or to Calcutta untouchables. But for most of us, most of the time, I am convinced he can be found most surely in “the natural sequence to the performance” of the duties he has given us that all of us (not just the unusual) can perform in our own homes and neighborhoods and that the Church, in its unique community, imposed as well as chosen, can best teach and empower us to perform.

I HAVE COME to an overwhelming witness of the divinity of the Book of Mormon, such that the Spirit moves me, even to tears, whenever I read any part of it, and I came there by teaching it at church. I am convinced that book pro­vides the most comprehensive “Christology”—or doctrine of how Christ saves us from sin—available to us on earth and that the internal evidences for the divinity of the book en­tirely overwhelm the evidences and arguments against it, however troubling. One Sunday last summer, as I tried to help a young woman who had attempted suicide a number of times, once just recently, and was feeling the deepest worthlessness and self-rejection, I was moved to read to her some passages from the Book of Mormon about Christ’s atonement. As I read those passages to that desperate young woman and bore witness of their truth and power in my own limes of despair and sin, her lips began to tremble with new feelings, and tears of hope formed in place of those of anguish.

In moments such as these, I was able, through my calling as a bishop, to apply the atoning blood of Christ, not in theory but in the truth of experience. In addition, I have come to know the ministering of angels because I have done my duty in temple attendance and have gone whenever possible to temple dedications. And I have found that we mortals do in­deed have the power to bless our oxen and cars as well as people because, as a branch president, I was pushed to the limits of my faith by my sense of responsibility to my branch.

Before I was a branch president, I served in the bishopric of the Stanford Ward in the mid-1960s and taught religion at the Institute to bright young students. At the same time, I was doing graduate work in English literature and trying to come to terms intellectually with modern skepticism and relativism and the moral dilemmas of the civil rights and anti-war move­ment as well as the educational revolutions of the time. I tended to see religion very much in terms of large moral and philosophical issues that the Church did or did not speak to. In 1970, I accepted a position as dean of academic affairs at St. Olaf, a Lutheran liberal arts college in the small town of Northfield, Minnesota, and within a week of arriving was called as president of the little Mormon branch in that area. I suddenly entered an entirely different world, one that tested me severely and taught me much about what “religion” is. At Stanford, much of my religious life had been involved with un­derstanding and defending the gospel—and had been ideal­istic, abstract, and critical. In Northfield, as branch president for twenty families scattered over seventy-five miles and ranging from Utah-born, hard-core inactives with devastating marital problems to bright-eyed converts with no jobs or with drunken fathers who beat them, I soon became involved in a religious life that was practical, specific, sacrificial, exasperating—and more satisfying. And I saw, more clearly than before, how true the Church is as an instrument for con­fronting all kinds of people with the processes of salvation, de­spite—even because of—its management by imperfect instru­ments like me.

I was able, through my calling as a bishop, to apply the atoning blood of Christ, not in theory but in the truth of experience.

I think of a young man in that branch who had been made a social cripple by some combination of mental and family problems: He was unable to speak a word in a group or to organize his life productively. As we gave him increasing responsibilities in our branch, supported him with much love and patience while he struggled to work with others and express himself, I was able to see him grow into a fine leader and confident husband and father. I think of a woman whose husband made her life a hell of drunken abuse but who patiently took care of him, worked all week to support her family, and came to church each Sunday in drab but jaunty finery and with uncomplaining determina­tion. She found there, with our help, a little hope, some beauty and idealism, and strength not only to endure but to go on loving what was unlovable. The Church blessed us all by bringing us together.

During the five years I served, there were, among those seventy to one hundred members, perhaps two or three whom I would normally have chosen for friends—and with whom I could have easily shared my most impassioned and “important” political and religious concerns and views, the ones that had so exercised me at Stanford. With inspiration far beyond my usual less-than-good sense, I did not begin my tenure as branch president by preaching about my ideas or promoting my crusades. I tried hard to see what the imme­diate problems and concerns of my flock were and to be a good pastor, one who fed and protected them. And a remark­able thing happened, I traveled hundreds of miles and spent many hours—helping a couple who had hurt each other into absolute silence learn to talk to each other again; guiding a student through drug withdrawal; teaching an autocratic mil­itary man to work cooperatively with his counselors in the el­ders quorum presidency; blessing a terribly sick baby, aided by its father, who was weak in faith and frightened; com­forting, at a hospital at four in the morning, parents whose son had just been killed by his brother driving drunk—and then helping the brother forgive himself. And after six months, I found that my branch members, initially properly suspicious of an intellectual from California, had come to feel in their bones, from their direct experience, that indeed my faith and devotion to them was “stronger than the cords of death.” And the result promised in Doctrine and Covenants 121:44-46 followed: There flowed to me “without compul­sory means” the power to talk about any of my concerns and passions and to be understood and trusted, even if not agreed with.

Now that may all sound a bit selfish, even obsessive, about the Church’s contribution to my own spiritual maturity. But what was happening to me was happening to others. A young couple who had lived in Spain for a year right after the wife had joined the Church came to the branch. Their Church ex­perience, especially hers, had been essentially gospel-oriented, deeply felt, and idealistic but abstract, involving very little ser­vice to others. She was a dignified and emotionally reserved woman, bright, creative, and judgmental—and thus afraid of uncontrolled situations or emotional exposure. The husband was meticulous, intimidating, somewhat aloof. I called them—despite their resistance—into positions of increasing responsibility and direct involvement with people in the branch, and I saw them, with some pain and tears, develop into powerfully open, empathetic, vulnerable people, able to understand, serve, learn from, and be trusted by people very different from themselves. And I saw them learn that the very exposures, exasperations, troubles, sacrifices, and disappoint­ments that characterize involvement in a lay church like Mormonism—and that are especially difficult for idealistic lib­erals to endure—are a main source of the Church’s power to teach us to love. They are now teaching others what they have learned.

This lesson—that the Church’s characteristic “prob­lems” are among its strengths— has been continually confirmed as I have served as bishop of a ward of young married students at BYU. The two most direct, miraculous, and ultimately re­demptive blessings the Lord gave us when the ward was or­ganized were having as mem­bers a spastic quadriplegic child in one family and seriously handicapped parents in an­other. I had known the crippled child’s mother for nearly a year. After I had spoken on the Atonement at her sacrament meeting, she had come to me for counsel and help with her anger, guilt, and loss of faith as she tried to understand the failure of hospital care that had made one of her twins into a desperate physical, emotional, and financial burden, one that had ended her husbands education and intended profession, severely tested their marriage and their faith as priesthood blessings seemed to fail, and left her close to breakdown and apostasy. Now, as I prayed for guidance in organizing a new ward, I felt clearly as I ever had those “strokes of intelligence” Joseph Smith described, telling me that I should, against all common sense, call her as my Relief Society president. I did, and despite being on the verge of moving away, she accepted. She became the main source of the unique spirit of honest communication and sense of genuine community our ward developed. She visited all the families and shared without re­serve her feelings, struggles, successes, and needs. Together with her husband, she spoke openly in our meetings about her son, his problems, and hers, asked for help and accepted it, and all the while did her duty and endured. We have all learned from them how to be more open, vulnerable, gra­cious, persistent, to turn to each other for all kinds of help and not to judge.

I first met the handicapped couple wandering through the halls of our ward house on our first Sunday. They were not looking for our ward; in fact, they lived just outside our boundaries, but I am certain the Lord sent them. They have re­quired a major expenditure of our ward resources—time, wel­fare aid, patience, tolerance—as we worked to get them em­ployed, into decent housing, out of debt, capable of caring for their bright, energetic child, and tried to help them become less obtrusive in meetings and less offensive socially. And I have learned two lessons. First, the Church structure and re­sources (which are designed for voluntary, cooperative but dis­ciplined effort with long-range, essentially spiritual goals) have been ideally suited to building the necessary support system for them, one that may yet succeed in keeping the family to­gether and may even bless them with more progress. Second, the blessings have come to the ward as much as to them as we have learned to expand greatly our ideas about “acceptable” behavior and especially our own capacities to love and serve and learn from people we would otherwise never know. One woman called me to report on her efforts to teach the woman some housekeeping and mothering skills, confessed her earlier resentments and exasperations, and told me in tears how much her heart had softened and her proud neck had bent as she had learned how to learn from this sister so different from herself.

These are examples, I believe, of what Paul was talking about in I Corinthians 12, the great chapter on spiritual gifts, where he teaches that all the parts of the body of Christ, the Church, are needed for their separate gifts—and, in fact, that those with “less honorable” and “uncomely” gifts are more needed and more in need of attention and honor because the world will automatically honor and use the others. It is in the Church especially that those with the gifts of vulnerability, pain, handicap, need, ignorance, intellectual arrogance, social pride, even prejudice and sin—those Paul calls the members that “seem to be more feeble”—can be accepted, learned from, helped, and made part of the body so that together we can all be blessed. It is there that those of us with the more comely and world-honored gifts of riches and intelligence can learn what we most need—to serve and love and patiently learn from those with other gifts.

It is in the Church especially that those with the gifts of vulnerability, pain, handicap, need, ignorance, intellectual arrogance, social pride, even prejudice and sin—those Paul calls the members that “seem to be more feeble”—can be accepted, learned from, helped, and made part of the body so that together we can all be blessed.

But that is very hard for the “rich” and “wise” to do. And that is why those who have one of those dangerous gifts tend to misunderstand and sometimes disparage the Church— which, after all, is made up of the common and unclean, the middle-class, middle-brow, politically unsophisticated, even prejudiced, average members. And we all know how exasper­ating they can be! I am convinced that in the exasperation lies our salvation, if we can let the context that most brings it out—the Church—also be our school for unconditional love. But that requires a change of perspective, one I will now sum­marize.

THE Church is as true as—perhaps truer than—the gospel because it is where all can find fruitful opposi­tion, where its revealed nature and inspired direction maintain an opposition between liberal and conservative values, between faith and doubt, secure authority and fright­ening freedom, individual integrity and public responsibility, and thus where there will be misery as well as holiness, bad as well as good. And if we cannot stand the misery and the struggle, if we would prefer that the Church be smooth and perfect and unchallenging rather than as it is—full of nagging human diversity and constant insistence that we perform ordi­nances and obey instructions and take seriously teachings that embody logically irresolvable paradoxes—if we refuse to lose ourselves wholeheartedly in such a school, then we will never know the redeeming truth of the Church. It is precisely in the struggle to be obedient while maintaining integrity, to have faith while being true to reason and evidence, to serve and love in the face of imperfections and even offenses, that we can gain the humility we need to allow divine power to enter our lives in transforming ways. Perhaps the most amazing paradox about the Church is that it literally brings together the divine and the human through priesthood service, the ordinances, the gifts of the spirit—in concrete ways that no abstract system of ideas, even the gospel, ever could.

My purpose here has not been to ignore the very real prob­lems of the Church or the power of the gospel truths. As I have tried to indicate all along, the Church’s paradoxical strength derives from the truthful paradoxes of the gospel it embodies, contraries we need to struggle with more profoundly in the Church. And we must not merely accept the struggles and ex­asperations of the Church as redemptive but genuinely try to reach solutions, where possible, and reduce unnecessary exas­perations. (Indeed, it is only when we grapple with the prob­lems, not merely as intellectual exercises but as problems in need of solution, that they prove redemptive.)

The Church’s paradoxical strength derives from the truthful paradoxes of the gospel it embodies, contraries we need to struggle with more profoundly in the Church.

But along with our sensitivity to problems, we must also, I believe, have more respect for the truth of action, of experi­ence, which the Church uniquely exposes us to, and respond with courage and creativity—be active, critical, faithful, be­lieving, doubting, struggling, unified members of the body of Christ. To do so, we must accept the Church as true in two im­portant senses. First, it is a repository of redemptive truths and of the authority to perform saving ordinances. Though those truths are difficult to pin down to simple propositions, taken together, they create the willingness to serve that makes pos­sible the redemptive schooling I have described. The Mormon concept of a non-absolute, progressing God, for instance, though not reducible to a creed or even to systematic theology, is the most reasonable, emotionally challenging but satisfying, ever revealed or devised. And even though that concept is not universally understood in the same way, it remains true, as a thoughtful friend once remarked to me, that “the idea of eternal progression is so engrained in out Church experience that no statement or even series of statements can root it out”—and that, of course, supports my main point about the primary truth of the Church. In addition, the power of ordi­nances, however true in form and divinely authorized, is lim­ited by the quality of our preparation and participation. Like baptism of infants, being ordained, partaking the sacrament, and receiving our endowments can be merely what Moroni called “dead works,” an offense to God and valueless, unless they are genuine expressions of our solidarity with others, living and dead, and sincere responses to the communion of the Saints that is the Church.

But one essay cannot cover everything, and I have been emphasizing how the Church is true in a second way that is too much neglected. Besides being the repository of true principles and authority, the Church is the instrument pro­vided by a loving God to help us become like him. It gives us schooling and experiences with each other that can bind us in an honest but loving community, which is the essential nurturing place for salvation. If we cannot accept the Church and the challenges it offers with the openness and courage and humility they require, then I believe our historical studies and our theological enterprises are mainly a waste of time and possibly destructive. We cannot understand the meaning of the history of Mormonism or judge the truth of Christ’s restored gospel unless we appreciate—and act on— the truth of the Church.

_____

FOURTEEN YEARS LATERThe church was not restored to validate our prejudices but to provide lots of chances to repent and forgive.

OVER THE PAST fourteen years, since essay was presented at the Sunstone symposium and then published in Sunstone and then republished as the title essay in Why TheChurch Is As True As the Gospel (Bookcraft, 1986; Tabernacle Books reprint, 1999), I have thought about it often. Sometimes I have done so when people told me the essay kept them active, and relatively sane, amid the many exasperations of Church activity and service, but mostly I have thought about it as a help in my own journey. Someone told me recently that the essay threw them a “spiri­tual life-preserver” at a crucial juncture; its ideas have been my own lifeboat, as well.

One of the first times I thought of it was when my neighbor Ray Andrus asked me to serve in the ward bishopric with him. Ray is very different from me, a BYU business school conserva­tive who I believed thought of me at that time as an imprac­tical, liberal egghead—and I was sure he was a chauvinistic anti-intellectual. It must have taken an angel with a drawn sword to convince him to call me, but he did. Having gone public in my essay with my conviction that lay service with strange people was at the heart of the revealed Restoration, I couldn’t turn him down—despite the strong temptation. In those callings, we prayed together, wept together over ward members’ tragedies and mistakes, blessed the sick and com­forted the dying together, and I learned to love him as I do few others.

I thought of my essay four years later, about a year after that bishopric had been released and I had been called to be a Gospel Doctrine teacher, when a fearfully conservative ward member complained to the bishop (I learned later) about my liberal interpretations of the Old Testament. I was quietly booted upstairs to teach the quarterly Teacher Development class (an ironic variation of “if you can’t teach, teach others how”). I was hurt, even a bit vengeful when I eventually learned what had really happened, but I remembered my bold words about going to Church as a servant not a consumer, and I worked hard at my new calling. Then another calling was added—Family History class teacher—and three or four times a year between Teacher Development classes, I repeated a strenuous, homework-filled, seven-week course I had devel­oped on “writing your personal history.” As I read and made suggestions about the tentative, often tender, manuscripts that eventually most of the ward had to write about their “most negative and most positive life experiences” (assignment #1) and then encouraged their ongoing efforts to keep that honesty and depth of feeling throughout their histories and daily jour­nals, I learned to love them anew—and they learned to know my heart and trust me.

We are the ones who must constantly remind ourselves that the Church is not a place to go for comfort, to get our own prejudices validated, but a place to comfort others, even to be afflicted by them.

I thought of “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel” a year ago when a new bishop, Dean Barnett, called me to teach Gospel Doctrine again and gave me a special blessing that I would be able to “relate to my class emotionally as well as in­tellectually.” The blessing has been fulfilled. The ward mem­bers, recalling the trust they gained as I served them in the bishopric and as their personal history teacher and finding that love confirmed in my clearly evident commitment to the gospel of Christ and to them as I teach, have allowed the class to become a marvelous forum for both diversity of ideas and unity of feeling. I have even succeeded in deconstructing the terms “conservative” and (especially) “liberal,” which have been turned by the culture wars from neutral words de­scribing different approaches to politics and culture and the­ology into dismissive, even violent, epithets, in both the United States of Americaand the Church. After hearing “lib­eral” used that way in our ward, even (somewhat tentatively) about me, I announced one Sunday that in two weeks, I was coming out of the closet. I urged them to come, with friends, to see if I was a conservative or a liberal. The place was packed, and I simply told my life story, from early spiritual experiences that convinced me that Jesus lives, wants uncon­ditional generosity from us, and has appointed his apostles to lead his Church, to my resulting confidence to examine any question or issue and my development as a pro-civil rights, anti-war activist in the 1960s, on to my experiences healing my Chevrolet and my father and serving as a branch presi­dent and a bishop—and as their brother in our ward. Then I asked them what I was. After debating for a while whether I was a conservative or a liberal or both, they accepted the sug­gestion of one of my most vocal, conservative class heck­lers—that I was really a “radical middle-of-the-roader.” I then applied this discussion to our lesson by giving them four in­terpretations of the Abraham and Isaac story: ultra-conserva­tive, conservative, liberal, and ultra-liberal. They saw both conservative and liberal views as defensible and valuable as well as limited, yielding different insights, and got the point about those being descriptive rather than normative terms. Since then, with a few slips, we’ve all been able to use the terms that way in class.

I also thought of my essay when some at the annual confer­ence of Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons in September 1998 told me, in tears, of their struggle against overwhelming odds to be active Mormons—rejected equally by the gay com­munities, which stereotype the Church as homophobic, and by their own leaders and ward brothers and sisters, who stereotype all gays as immoral, even devilish. The message of “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel” certainly applies to the minorities in the Church, whose efforts to belong and serve are made even more exasperating by the hostility, uneasiness, and even sentimental patronizing by the majority. But the es­say’s main message is to that majority, who set the cultural tone of the Church. We are the ones who must constantly remind ourselves that the Church is not a place to go for comfort, to get our own prejudices validated, but a place to comfort others, even to be afflicted by them. It is a revealed and effec­tive opportunity to give—to learn and experience the meaning of the Atonement and its power to change us through uncon­ditional love. It is a place where we have many chances to re­pent and forgive—if, for a change, we can focus on our own failings and the needs of others to grow through their and our imperfect efforts.

How to cite this essay:

Eugene England, “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel,” Sunstone 22, nos. 3/4 (June 1999), 61–69.

NOTES

1 History of the Church 6:428.2 David O. McKay, The Improvement Era, December 1968, 85.

]]>http://www.eugeneengland.org/why-the-church-is-as-true-as-the-gospel/feed30On Fidelity, Polygamy, and Celestial Marriagehttp://www.eugeneengland.org/on-fidelity-polygamy-and-celestial-marriage
http://www.eugeneengland.org/on-fidelity-polygamy-and-celestial-marriage#commentsThu, 27 Oct 2011 01:56:23 +0000http://www.eugeneengland.org/?p=905THIS IS AN essay in speculative theology. In it I explore an idea — the general Mormon expectation of future polygamy — that has important reli­gious and moral implications but about which there is little definite scriptural direction and no clear official doctrine. I attempt here, in the spirit of a venerable tradition in Mormon thought from Joseph Smith’s King Follett Discourse and Orson Pratt’s The Seer to the sermons and writings of Hugh B. Brown and Lowell Bennion, to make a reconsideration, unauthoritative but serious. I suggest some new, possibly beneficial ways we might think and feel about celestial marriage — both as it is and as it might be. My essay is not a critique of official Mormon practice or doctrine but an invitation to reexamine some unofficial ideas and expectations which persist among most Mormons because of a past practice — a practice I believe was divinely inspired but also divinely, and permanently, rescinded.

Shakespeare’ Julius Caesar contains a crucial scene after Brutus has decided to join the conspiracy and kill Caesar. Brutus is reflecting on that decision in his orchard in the early morning, when his wife Portia joins him. Awakened when he left her side and further alarmed by the voices and cloaked figures of the departing conspirators, she worries that all this may be related to his “musing and sighing” at dinner the evening before and the “ungentle looks” and “impatience” with which he waved her aside. Even now Brutus claims he is merely “not well in health” and tells her to “go to bed.” But Portia will not be dismissed and speaks straight to the heart of his real illness:

About this Article

This classic essay is a thorough examination of the ideals of marriage that also challenges the assumptions held by many Latter-day Saints that plural marriage will be the dominant order of marriage in the celestial kingdom. Originally published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20, no.4 (Winter 1987): 138–54.

You have some sick offense within your mind,
Which, by the right and virtue of my place,
I ought to know of
I [ask] you, by my once commended beauty,
By all your vows of love, and that great vow
Which did incorporate and make us one,
That you unfold to me, yourself, your half,
Why you are heavy. . . .
Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus,
Is it [there stated] I should know no secrets
That appertain to you? Am I yourself
But, as it were, in sort or limitation,
[That is, am I one with you in only a limited way?]
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,
And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs
Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife. (2.1.268-75; 280-87)

Portia then reminds Brutus of the qualities of lineage and character that first drew him to her and, as further proof of her firmness and courage to bear his painful and intimate secrets, reveals that she had wounded herself in the thigh but had suffered patiently all night without troubling him. Brutus exclaims, “O ye gods. Render me worthy of this noble wife!” But then he does nothing to achieve that worthiness. A knock at the door signals an addi­tional conspirator to be won over, and Brutus readily allows this crucial oppor­tunity with his wife to be interrupted. Although he promises Portia that “by and by thy bosom shall partake/The secrets of my heart,” he never keeps that promise. Had he shared his deepest self with his other half, his wife, and been, advised by her better perspective, this man, whom Marc Anthony later calls “the noblest Roman of them all,” might have been deterred from bringing greater evil on Rome than the evil he sought to cure. Instead, he also destroys the life of the intrepid Portia, who kills herself by swallowing hot coals after she learns what he has done and sees his fate. And Brutus finally takes his own life after Octavius and Anthony defeat his armies at Philippi.

Shakespeare thus shows how well he understood the importance of fidelity, the complete faithfulness, loyalty, and sharing that is possible only when a man> and a woman join their full lives — physical, mental, and spiritual — in what he called “the marriage of true minds” (Sonnet 116). He saw fidelity as cen­tral to married love, which he portrayed as the supreme form of human happi­ness and wholeness at the end of each of his comedies and the violation or inter­ruption of which lies at the heart of most of the tragedies and late romances.

I believe Shakespeare is right. Marital fidelity is central to mortal joy and eternal life, even godhood, and great catastrophes are already resulting from our current neglect of it, in society generally and in too many Mormon mar­riages. It is the key to our concepts of sexual morality before and after mar­riage. And there is, I believe, a serious danger to the ideal of fidelity — and thus both to our sexual morality and to our concepts of ourselves as eternal men and women — in the expectation, shared I fear by many Mormons, that the highest form of marriage in the celestial realm is what is technically called polygyny, plural wives for a single husband.

I believe official Mormon polygyny, as it was practiced in the nineteenth century, was inspired by God through his prophets. I am the descendant of polygynists. I honor those literal ancestors and my many spiritual ancestors who lived that law — faithfully, morally, and at enormous costs to themselves and the Church. Those costs included alienation from American culture and from their own moral training, martyrdom for a few, and very nearly the total destruction of their Church and culture by the United States government, which was willing to use brutal and unconstitutional means to force Mormon conformity. I believe that the good achieved by polygyny outweighed those costs and made possible the establishment and success of the restored kingdom of God on earth during its beginning period. And when that practice had achieved its purposes, limited to a specific historical period and place, God took it away.

I believe God removed polygyny by direct inspiration to his prophets and did it because polygyny was no longer worth the costs it exacted. He did not remove it because our ancestors lacked the courage or ability to continue to pay those costs or merely wanted to accommodate themselves to mainstream Amer­ican values. I believe that any persons who thoroughly and honestly examine the evidence will conclude that there were terrible difficulties and mistakes, embarrassing vacillations and equivocations, even transgressions and decep­tions (by both leaders and lay members of the Church), that accompanied both the beginning and the end of polygyny. But if such persons also tender some faith in the restored gospel and its prophetic leadership and exercise some human empathy and compassion, they will find that the terrible problems that came with plural marriage did not come, as some have alleged or implied, because Joseph Smith was uninspired or merely lustful or because Brigham Young and John Taylor persisted in a mistake against God’s will. As I read their letters, journals, and sermons and the accounts and testimony of those who knew them best, I find ample evidence, despite the serious mistakes and problems, that Joseph Smith had great self-control and that all three prophets were deeply inspired leaders, who would not persist in a form of marriage — the supreme sacrament of Mormon theology — that was contrary to God’s will.

The anguish, mistakes, and problems that instituting polygyny brought to the Mormons came precisely because most of the people involved were trying heroically both to be moral (that is, true to God’s laws given in the past) and also to respond to what they believed was undeniable new revelation — revela­tion that directly countered their own moral inclinations and Christian train­ing. And I believe that in that clash of the old moral code with new revelation lies the best answer to the question of why. Why would God require such a strange practice, one counter to standard Christian morality and inherited rationality, one that even contradicted sensible and God-given moral laws — and thus could be practiced only at enormous cost?

I believe the answer is similar to the answers to some similarly difficult questions, such as: Why would God command his faithful prophet Abraham to kill his son Isaac, when God himself condemned human sacrifice as immoral? or, Why would God allow his prophets to deny priesthood blessings to blacks, counter to his own teachings about universal equality? Polygyny was indeed (as the Lord himself tells us in Doctrine and Covenants 132 by explicitly com­paring Abraham’s taking of a second wife to his offering of Isaac) what can be called an “Abrahamic” test, that is, a command by God to violate an earlier commandment:

God commanded Abraham, and Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife. . . . Was Abraham, therefore, under condemnation? . . . Nay; for I, the Lord, commanded it. Abraham was commanded to offer his son Isaac; nevertheless, it was written: Thou shalt not kill. Abraham, however, did not refuse, and it was accounted unto him for righteousness (v. 35; see w. 34-37).

God apparently uses such a unique and uniquely troubling test because it is the only way to teach us something paradoxical but true and very important about the universe — that trust in our personal experiences with divinity must sometimes outweigh our rational morality. Obedience to the divine commands that come directly to us must sometimes supersede our understanding of earlier commands if we are ever to transcend the human limitations of even our best inherited culture and religion. We must learn, sometimes very painfully, to be open to continuous revelation. We must learn such a lesson partly because truth and history are too complex to be reduced to simple, irrevocable com­mandments — even from past prophets — like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt always have only one spouse.” Truth is ultimately “rational,” but it is not always or immediately clear to our present reason.

Our ancestors’ painful obedience, then, to the new and “contradictory” revelation of polygyny both tested and confirmed them as saints, worthy to build God’s kingdom. They learned, as Shakespeare also knew, that “Sweet are the uses of adversity” (As You Like It 2.1.12). And they learned that lesson from the most wrenching human adversity — when opposites are posed by God himself. But precisely because it was an Abrahamic test, and thus a means to reveal and develop qualities necessary in one particular and unusual historical setting, polygyny is not a practice to project into the eternities as the basis for a celestial order. Heaven is, by definition, a place where the cultural limitations and historical peculiarities of earth-life no longer prevail. Abrahamic tests and other special historical requirements, such as “lower” laws like the Levitical priesthood and tithing, teach us much about God’s flexible dealing with human limitations and historical conditions but little or nothing about a supernatural celestial order, beyond such temporary mortal conditions.1

What, then, is such an order like? What should be our model of celestial marriage? Though we are given very little direct description of that highest heaven, the scriptures clearly stress fidelity and union of opposed equals:

Neither is the man without the woman nor the woman without the man, in the Lord (1 Cor. 11:11).

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. . . . There­fore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh (Gen. 2:23-24).

For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things (2 Ne. 2:11).

Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives, and lost the confidence of your children, because of your bad examples before them; and the sobbings of their hearts ascend up to God against you. And because of the strictness of the word of God, which cometh down against you, many hearts died, pierced with deep wounds (Jacob 2:35).

These and other scriptures, together with the teachings of modern prophets and the temple marriage sealing ordinance, support a theology of absolute and equal fidelity between a man and a woman as the basis for sexual morality, marital happiness, eternal increase, and, in its fullest implications, for godhood itself, the creative power that makes all existence possible. This theology of marriage is unique to Mormonism and is to me the most attractive and impres­sive part of the gospel — after the atonement of Christ. And just as the atone­ment is the key to our salvation from sin and death in this life, so celestial mar­riage is the key to exaltation, our eternal progression in the life to come.

The Mormon theology of marriage has two main characteristics. First, it implies that complementary oppositions lie at the very heart of physical, moral, and social existence. The most fundamental of these is the male-female polarity. That fundamental opposition, when it is tamed and matured into physical and spiritual unity, makes possible the creation and proper nurture both of mortal children and of spirit children to populate new universes. Female-male unity (which God has powerfully imaged in the concept of becoming “one flesh”) ideally involves complete sharing — with a separate, co-eternal individual and without loss of our own individuality — of all our singularity, vulnerability, trust, hopes, and potentialities.

Since celestial marriage is the crucial requirement for exaltation to god-hood, Mormon theology suggests that the maturity essential to discovery and exaltation of the self is ultimately possible only in a fully equal, bi-polar but thus complementary, individual-to-individual synthesis. The supreme figure for this ideal, powerfully reinforced each time faithful Mormons attend temple endowment or sealing ceremonies, is that of the earth’s first lovers and parents: We are each invited to become, figuratively, an Adam or an Eve. We are thus imaginatively united in that perfect one-to-one unity established in the begin­ning by God, because “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Hebrew “alone” means incomplete, unfulfilled, rather than lonely (Whittaker 1980, 36). We are united that we might “know” each other, meaning in Hebrew to fully comprehend and share our being (Whittaker 1980, 36). The highest model for marriage, then, established in the garden and reinforced in the most sacred LDS ceremonies, is monogamous and cen­tered in full one-to-one fidelity.

The image of becoming one flesh is realized most literally, of course, in conception, when our bodies actually unite to make new life. The sexual rela­tionship perfectly represents spiritual union within polarity, that one-to-one sharing that ultimately makes possible the creativity of godhood. We can vio­late that creative union of two opposites, in various ways — by immature haste or promiscuity, by self-gratification or lust (either outside marriage or within it, if sex is used selfishly), by lying to each other, by not sharing fully and often our deepest feelings and hopes, by refusing to be vulnerable and thus walling off parts of ourselves, by not working constantly to justify and build complete trust.

The second main idea about marriage in Mormon theology is that since the highest form of love in the universe is the fully sexual and exclusive love of a man and a woman eternally committed to each other, it is the key to our highest joys and exaltations — and our greatest pains and failures. It is the love that ultimately, whatever the accidents of mortal life which may prevent children now, is able to continue the work and glory of Godhood through eternal increase and creation. Therefore heterosexual married love is the ideal held out for all and made available to all.

Mortal probation continues for a long time after death to provide equal opportunities to all, and our theology promises that any genetic, developmental, or cultural problems or physical accidents that prevent marriage or children in this life will be resolved and that opportunities for such marriages and children will be provided in the next life.

But Mormon theology also promises dire results if we willfully oppose or neglect that ideal, even the piercing of our hearts with deep wounds. There are absolute prohibitions against homosexual activity and extramarital inter­course and very strong discouragements of lust — of promiscuous, selfish, or obsessive eroticism — even within marriage. The only rational explanation, it seems to me, for such warnings and prohibitions is that by their very nature certain practices tend to center on self rather than relationship and to deny the creative integrity of sexual intercourse — that is, its unique capability, at least in potential, to produce new life — or to violate the perfect trust and fidelity that the vulnerability and creative power of male-female union both nurture and need.

What, then, about polygyny? It, of course, does not fit the model of one-to-one fidelity I have described. First, we must consider the possibility that polygyny really does not violate fidelity, that if people are good enough they can have trust and sexual wholeness with more than one person. This could well have been true of our polygynous ancestors. Might it be even more likely in the celestial realms where the conditions and our capabilities will be much better than what we know now? I have found that this is the hope and assump­tion of many, perhaps most, Latter-day Saints who have seriously considered the possibility they might eventually be required to live in plural marriage.

I find two serious problems with such a hope. First, it is based on a dan­gerous notion: that simply getting more of a good thing is always better — that a great love for one person is even better if extended into great love for many persons. Consider, however, the differences between the elements that make up truly complete love. They include charity or unconditional, Christ­like love — but also friendship and erotic love, love that makes choices, love that k based on differential desires. The unconditional, redemptive love God has for all his children and commands us all to learn is certainly capable of being multiplied. But such unconditional love is only a part of married love. And the other elements of a complete, married love, including restrictive obli­gations, covenants of complete and exclusive sharing, and the creative sexual love that makes new children and universes possible, are not improved by multiplication. In fact, they are usually destroyed or at least weakened by it. Romantic, married love is, I believe, strengthened by being exclusive, even for the gods.

Eternal marriage uniquely includes all the elements of love: the exclusive as well as the inclusive and unconditional. Although it can expand to include sacrificial love for populous worlds of spirit children, it will nevertheless be injured by forces that weaken by division the powerful bonds of filial obliga­tion and sexual fidelity. In other words, celestial married love differs from mortal love not because it includes a larger group of individuals but because it includes more kinds of love than any other relationship — sexual love and quite idiosyncratic “liking” as well as charity or Christ-like love. But those unique and exclusive extra qualities, which give married love the greatest potential of any relationship, require the fully mutual fidelity only possible between one whole woman and one whole man.

Such fidelity, I believe, moves us beyond polygyny or polyandry, beyond patriarchy or matriarchy, even beyond priesthood in its usual functions and meaning. It seems to me that those are all lower laws, serving their inspired purposes — but only during certain mortal times with their cultural limita­tions. The ideal celestial order of marriage — of power, of creation, and of administration — will be the one the temple marriage sealing ceremony invites us to look forward to if we are faithful: a full and equal complementarity of a queen and a king, a priestess and a priest. It will be what President Ezra Taft Benson has called, after giving the term his own unusual definition, the “patriarchal order.” In “What I Hope You Will Teach Your Children About the Temple,” President Benson lists three priesthood orders, the Aaronic, Melchizedek, and “patriarchal,” pointing out that the third is “described in modern revelation as an order of family government where a man and woman enter into a covenant with God — just as did Adam and Eve — to be sealed for eternity, to have posterity, and to do the will and work of God throughout their mortality” (1985, 8).2

Just as the lower Aaronic (or Levitical) priesthood is superseded by the Melchizedek when historical conditions or individual maturity warrant, so I believe the Melchizedek priesthood is a preparatory order to some extent super­seded by the fully equal order that men and women receive when sealed in the temple. And though we are apparently not yet mature enough for God to inspire us to implement that order fully and administratively on earth, we should, it seems to me, try to imagine it for the future, at least in the celestial kingdom, and prepare ourselves for it by living it as fully as possible now.

And that brings me to a second problem with the dubious argument that celestial marriage will be polygynous because we will be morally superior there, more able to love inclusively. Such an expectation can tempt us to love inclu­sively and superficially — even promiscuously — in this life. Mormons some­times joke about looking forward to polygamy — because it will be more sexually diversified for men or less sexually demanding or psychologically intense for women (or simply allow a division of labor in a household to the advantage of women). The serious edge under these jokes sometimes emerges in open longing for something “better” than we have known in monogamy, perhaps a wider circle of easy friendships, unfettered by the full demands and resultant exclusions of being one flesh.

The trouble with these jokes and serious hopes is their projected flight from the full responsibilities of married love, which include loving unconditionally — but also include being a special, intimate friend, having children, sharing one’s deepest self, and being fully vulnerable. In Michael Novak’s words, “Seeing myself through the unblinking eyes of an intimate, intelligent other, an honest spouse, is humiliating beyond anticipation” (1976, 41). And we are tempted to avoid that humiliation, however redemptive it is. Having comparatively shallow, friendly, intellectual, artistic relations with a group of people, even having merely sexual adventures with a variety, is not as difficult as develop­ing a full relationship of fidelity with one person. And I fear that many Mor­mon men and women let the expectation of polygyny as the ideal future order justify their inclination to be vaguely promiscuous or superficial in sexual rela­tionships, to flirt or share their identity with a number of people, or simply to withdraw from the struggle into blessed singularity — and there, too often, to be satisfied with some version of love of self. In short, some Mormons, assum­ing future polygyny, practice for it now by diverting their affections and loyal­ties away from the arduous task of achieving full spiritual and physical unity with the one person they would otherwise inescapably have to face, an imper­fect spouse.

The nineteenth-century Mormon experience shows that such temptations are related to the very nature of polygyny. Those who lived it best, most devotedly and successfully, apparently found they could do so only by making the relationships more superficial — that is, less romantic, less emotionally intense and focused. Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, wife of three men, including Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and one of the strongest public advocates of polygamy, was quoted in the New York World, 19 November 1869, as saying, “A successful polygamous wife must regard her husband with indifference, and with no other feeling than that of reverence, for love we regard as a false sentiment: a feeling which should have no exis­tence in polygamy” (in Van Wagoner 1986, 102). Vilate Kimball, first wife of Heber C, counselled an unhappy plural wife that “her comfort must be wholly in her children; that she must lay aside wholly all interest or thought in what her husband was doing while he was away from her” (Van Wagoner 1986, 102-3).

Diaries, letters, and reminiscences of polygynous wives and children reveal that regular down-playing of the romantic dimension of married love was indeed one of the costs of polygyny, whatever its compensating values. Even the best relationships appear to be bittersweet. But I fear that such a flight from the complete love that includes romance may actually appeal both to overly idealistic unmarried Mormons and to Mormons who are not completely happy in their marriages now. If so, it is an unfortunate compromise, one without genuine compensating values and one to be repented of rather than rationalized by the hope that eternal marriage will be polygynous. One of the horrifying results of this idea, conveyed by some teachers of LDS youth, that polygyny is a “purer” love since it is a more inclusive and less selfish love and thus the celestial form of marriage, is that they thus help prepare some young Mormon women to be seduced by the argument of fundamentalists that they can engage in that “higher” order right now! Such thinking also tends to encourage promiscuity in the young married, who may therefore share their deepest feelings, even sexual interests, too broadly; it encourages passivity in the middle-aged, who may thus neglect the constant struggle for full fidelity, which includes romance and friendship as well as charity; and it encourages irresponsibility in the old, who may finally retreat from their life-long task of building a deep and full celestial love into bored tolerance or silent alienation.

Now let me turn to a consideration of why, in addition to the serious danger to fidelity, I believe polygyny, though it was once an inspired practice, is not an eternal principle. I have five main reasons.

1. A requirement so central and important to our eternal salvation should be firmly grounded in the scriptures, but it is not. In fact, the clearest scriptures state that polygyny is only an occasional requirement, otherwise extremely dan­gerous. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Jacob reports the Lord’s insis­tence that David’s and Solomon’s polygyny was “abominable,” apparently, as the Lord suggests to Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants 132:37-38, because they went beyond what he commanded them. The Lord tells the Nephite men categorically to have one wife only and no concubines — no divided fidelity of any kind (Jacob 2:27). In this general exhortation to chastity and monogamy, God offers only one exception: “For if I will . . . raise up seed unto me, I will command my people” (Jacob 2:30). The only such exception, that we know about since that time is documented in Doctrine and Covenants 132, where the Lord commands his young Church to practice polygyny, and we must assume that commandment was given for the fundamental purpose stated in the Book of Mormon — to raise up seed unto him.

I think the operative words in the Lord’s statement of his one exception are “unto me.” Polygyny, historical evidence indicates, did not produce a larger number of children; it was more likely instituted because of the Abrahamic test which it provided parents and because it concentrated children in well-organized and elite families. My sense is that it produced a more devout and religiously well-trained progeny, seed unto God. That is certainly what some leaders, such as Brigham Young (JD 3: 264) and Erastus Snow (JD 24: 165), believed was a central purpose and effect of polygyny. My chief evidence that they were right is the subjective one that well into the 1950s and 60s, when the surge in converts began, I was present at a number of meetings where standing count indicated that a huge majority of active Mormons, especially leaders, were descendants of polygynists, a much larger percentage than the percentage of Mormons who actually practiced polygyny.

At any rate, Doctrine and Covenants 132 does not say or imply that polygyny is anything more than an exception, commanded for a specific pur­pose relevant to a specific historical circumstance and, by implication, to be rescinded when those circumstances changed or when the costs began to out­weigh the benefits.

All of the passages in section 132 about eternal conditions and promises relate to “the new and everlasting covenant,” to what will happen “if a man marry a wife … and it is sealed unto them by the Holy Spirit of promise” (v. 19), that is, to eternal marriage, not to plural marriage. The language concerning plural marriage, it seems to me, simply grants permission to engage in this unusual practice then required of some Mormons, with precise conditions designed to make certain that such an extremely difficult and dangerous re­quirement be controlled within the moral and religious bounds of the priest­hood and the temple: “If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another [by the law of the priesthood], and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second . . . then is he justified” (v. 61).

Only two verses of Section 132 could be read as support for eternal polygyny. Verse 39 declares that David will not inherit his wives “out of this world” because of his sin against Uriah and Bathsheba, possibly implying that had he not sinned he would inherit those wives in the next life. And verse 63 states that plural wives are given to a man “to multiply and replenish the earth . . . and to fulfill the promise which was given by my Father before the foundation of the world, and for their exaltation in the eternal worlds, that they may bear the souls of men; for herein is the work of my Father continued, that he may be glorified.” This latter verse is ambiguous. It could mean simply that obedience to God’s command of polygyny on earth, by those so commanded, makes possible their exaltation and thus the continued bearing of spirit children in their eternal marriages, of one woman and one man, in the celestial kingdom. Or it could mean that some polygyny is eternal: that for those who are sealed into it in this life, polygyny in heaven is necessary for their exaltation, since it makes it possible for the wives involved to “bear the souls of men” in the celestial kingdom.

If verse 39 means that David could have inherited his plural wives and the second interpretation of verse 63 is correct, at most these verses suggest that polygyny will continue for those sealed into it here on earth, not that it will be required of others. Yet that second interpretation of verse 63 seems to me completely unacceptable because it requires that we see the purpose of plural wives as simply, or mainly, to bear more spirit children. Such a notion strikes directly at the heart of our concept of men and women as coeternal and equal partners in the celestial realms. It is based on one of the popular rationales for eternal polygyny but the one which is perhaps most repugnant to an increas­ing number of faithful Mormons — that since women take nine months to bear mortal children and presumably will take that long to bear spirit children as well, each man must have many wives, keeping them all pregnant most of the time, to produce those billions of spirit children for “the eternal worlds” referred to in Doctrine and Covenants 132:63. That argument seems to me so obviously wrong I am tempted to simply dismiss it, but I have found that enough influential Mormons and teachers of religion espouse such an argument that I must respond.

Suppose it would take a woman, bearing a child each nine months, 60 bil­lion years to produce the spirit children for an earth like ours (the 80 billion or so people demographers compute will have lived on earth by 2000 a.d. ). It does not seem reasonable to me that God would require polygyny, with all its attendant problems, simply to reduce that time to twenty or even ten billion years by giving each man four or six wives. If humans can already produce test-tube babies and clones, God has certainly found more efficient ways to pro­duce spirit children than by turning celestial partners into mere birth machines, To anticipate such a limited, unequal role for women in eternity insults and devalues them.

My basic point is that the scriptures are at most, ambiguous about the place of polygyny in celestial marriage. I find no scriptural evidence that polygyny is required either for all of us or for those who are to be the most exalted. The silence of the scriptures concerning something so important and fundamental cannot be an oversight: “Surely, the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7).

Yet a number of nineteenth-century Mormon apostles and prophets, in their defense of polygyny, claimed it was the celestial order of marriage, includ­ing Brigham Young (JD 11:269, 271; 16:166) and Joseph F. Smith (JD 20:28). However, in the same sermons where they declared polygyny to be the celestial order, these leaders also asserted or implied, with the same con­viction, one or more of the following: that the wives of those who do not prac­tice polygamy will be, in the next life, given to those who do (JD 16:166); that the more wives and children one has, the greater one’s future glory (JD 1:61; 20:29-31); that if Utah did not receive statehood before polygamy was abolished, it never would (JD 11:269); and that the practice of polygyny by the Church would never be taken away (especially John Taylor, see Van Wagoner 1986, 128). Since we no longer believe — or accept as inspired — those other claims, the associated claim, that celestial marriage is polygynous, is at least called into question.

I can understand that it might have been necessary for nineteenth-century Mormons and their leaders, who invested so much in the practice of polygamy and paid such terrible individual and group costs for it, to justify their commit­ment in part by the belief that it was more than an inspired but temporary practice. However, that does not make their belief true — or at least does not universalize eternal polygyny. The situation is similar to that of denial of priesthood to blacks. Some aposdes and prophets until fairly recent times have stated that the denial was more than an inspired Church practice — that it was rooted in pre-existent choices and the eternal nature of blacks or their ancestors (JD 11:272; First Presidency Statement 1949; McConkie 1958, 102). But in the same sermons or writings they also recorded their equally firm beliefs that interracial mixing with blacks should bring death (JD 10:110) or that the Civil War would not free the slaves (JD 10:250) or that blacks would never receive the priesthood in this life until all whites had (JD 11:272; 7:291; First Presidency, 1949; McConkie 1958, 476). All of those claims have been proven false, one by direct revelation from God, and that fact, I believe, at the very least leaves us free to question the associated claim that dark skin or black ancestry is a sign of a mistake in the pre-existence.

Because God spoke in the 1978 revelation to end the practice of priesthood denial to blacks we should seriously question the rationale that well-meaning Church members developed to explain that practice: the racist and unscrip-tural doctrine still persisted in by some that blacks were not “valiant” in the premortal world. And because God spoke in 1890 to end the practice of polygyny, we should also question the rationale that well-meaning Church members had developed to justify it: the sexist and unscriptural doctrine of post-mortal plural marriage.

We should all aspire to the courage of Elder Bruce R. McConkie, who after the 1978 revelation had flady contradicted his earlier teachings that blacks would never receive the priesthood on earth, apparently recognized he must also discard some associated teachings: “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whom­soever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world [about how ‘all are alike unto God … black and white1 (2Ne. 26:33)]” (1983, 153).

We now have additional light and knowledge, because of the 1890 revela­tion and subsequent Church teachings and practices, on what that same Book of Mormon passage means in claiming “all are alike unto God . . . male and female.” Certainly analogies do not provide proof by themselves, but this one should encourage us to reassess past teachings which were linked to teachings we now know to be false and that are contrary to our post-Manifesto under­standing of marriage.

I realize this is a troubling, perhaps dangerous, position: If we start ques­tioning some statements of Church leaders, why not all? If they were wrong about some of their rationales for polygyny and priesthood denial, why are they not wrong about God’s involvement in first instituting those practices — or anything else in the Restoration? Though I sympathize with—even share— this anxiety, the assertion that revelation is either totally true or totally untrue is still a false dichotomy: We simply do not believe, as Mormons, that we must accept all scripture and prophetic teaching as equally inspired, and we have no doctrine of prophetic infallibility. The scriptures and our modern Church leaders themselves have made this point again and again and have given us some guidelines for distinguishing binding truth and direction from good advice and both of these from “the mistakes of men” (“Preface” to the Book of Mor­mon; see also D&C 1:24-27).

In the particular case of polygyny a reasonable guideline can be formu­lated : If a Church practice which served valuable historical purposes is rescinded, thus proving false some statements which were made in the process of defending it as permanent because it is based in some eternal doctrine, then all such statements are called in question and can be thoughtfully and prayer­fully assessed in relation to other fundamental scriptures and doctrines (as I am trying to do here) without opening the Pandora’s box of complete skepti­cism. I can (and do) believe that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were divinely called prophets who received direct revelation across a remarkable range of important practices and doctrines. I am not thereby constrained to believe (and do not) that they never made a mistake or never suffered from human limitations of understanding that plague us all. Modern prophets them­selves have explicitly renounced specific practices and teachings of both those earlier prophets (the Adam-God theory, for instance), sometimes even supply­ing rational arguments to help us understand how such mistakes or changes could occur, without thereby calling into question those prophets’ general inspiration or prophetic authority.

2. My second reason for questioning eternal polygyny, in addition to the lack of scriptural support for such a doctrine, is that if polygyny were the highest order of marriage, surely the Lord would want us to practice it whenever and wherever we could on earth. But he does not. I feel certain, and those I have consulted who are trained in the law agree, that a serious effort by the Church to strike down the anti-polygamy laws as unconstitutional would succeed. But the Church not only does not make such an effort; I understand it takes action against those who seriously advocate doing so. We do not even allow our members to continue practicing polygyny in countries where it is legal. Thus, one of the strangest paradoxes of Mormon history is that the Reorganized Church, which claims the Lord never revealed polygyny, allows members to practice it in India and Africa, while the Utah-based LDS Church, which claims the Lord did reveal it, does not allow anyone to practice it.

3. There is a general Mormon assumption that the plural wives who were sealed to polygynists (or are sealed to widowers) are bound in eternal sealings that cannot be broken and so at least those marriages must be plural in eternity. But this assumption has been essentially refuted by the modern Church prac­tice, initiated by President David O. McKay, of sometimes sealing a woman to more than one man. Of course, this form of plural marriage (polyandry) usually occurs only in temple work done for a dead woman who was married to more than one man during life. She is now sealed to all her husbands with­out our presuming to make a choice for her — and, of course, her choice in the spirit world of one eternal companion must then invalidate the other seal­ings and leave those men free to find eternal companions. Sealings thus seem to guarantee bonds only when they are subsequently agreed upon but do not forcibly bind anyone. But if this is so in such polyandrous sealings, then it might just as well be the case in polygynous ones. The man involved could have the opportunity to work out a one-to-one relationship as the basis for celestial marriage from among the women to whom he was sealed, and the other sealings must then be invalidated by mutual consent, thus freeing those women to form one-to-one celestial marriages with others.

Who would those others be? Possibly the “extra” husbands of widows similarly released by their choice of one eternal companion, or, of course, the many single men who have lived on earth, but also, it has been half-seriously suggested, the surplus of male babies who die and inherit celestial glory. Being required to make such a choice may sound like harsh doctrine for those women who in good faith look forward to being with the one man they have known and loved, even if he has other wives. But that doctrine is no harsher than the same doctrine for the man married to one woman whom he loves deeply, even though she has been married to others, perhaps sealed to one of them and now, under President McKay’s change, sealed to all. All but one of these men must find new companions. Obviously we must trust in the great and almost unique Mormon principle of continued life and development after death but before judgment, when opportunity will abound for single men and women, as well as unmatched spouses, to find their eternal companions.

4. That semi-serious aside about surplus male babies leads to my fourth argument: Another popular rationale for polygyny is that there are and will be more righteous women than men. This rather patronizing and certainly unprovable sentiment cloaks a sexist assumption, demeaning to both men and women. And a fine satire on the question, “In the Heavens Are Parents Single? Report No. 1,” by the “Committee on Celestial Demographics,” published in the Spring 1984 Dialogue, makes a plausible case that there will actually be many more men than women in the highest degree of the celestial kingdom. We know that 104 males are born for every 100 females and 47 percent of males born into the world have died before age eight, as opposed to only 44 percent of females. If we accept the usual interpretation of Doctrine and Covenants 137 — that all children who die under eight are exalted — then already, from the over 70 billion who have come to earth, nearly 17 billion males and 15 billion females are destined for the highest degree of the celestial kingdom on the basis of premature death alone, a surplus of nearly 2 billion males (1984, 85-86). Even if women were naturally more righteous, it would take a huge disproportion in that righteousness to merely equalize those num­bers, to say nothing of creating a situation that required plural wives.

Of course, that “Report” is extremely speculative and fundamentally wrong-headed, as good satire always is. I believe it is more likely and certainly more consistent with free agency that children who die and are thus, in the words of Doctrine and Covenants 137:7, “heirs of the celestial kingdom,” are not thus guaranteed exaltation but only guaranteed an opportunity for exalta­tion — and that the number of males and females in the celestial kingdom is essentially equal.

Actually, I believe those numbers are exactly equal. Since celestial mar­riage itself is a prior requirement for the highest decree of the celestial king­dom, then it would seem that we arrive there, not as different numbers of men or women who then must pair off — or pluralize off — into marriages, but only after having achieved, as part of our righteousness, a celestial marriage. We arrive partnered. In other words, arguments about relative numbers of righ­teous men and women are irrelevant; the highest degree of the celestial kingdom will be, by definition, a place made up entirely of eternal male-female couples.

5. My fifth reason for believing celestial marriage is not polygynous — and my main reason for thinking that we must not simply say, “We can’t possibly imagine what it will be like in heaven and so shouldn’t worry about it” — is that it seems to me, from reflection and from talking with Mormon women, that the devaluation of women inherent in the expectation of polygyny is destructive of their sense of identity and worth now. For instance, the argu­ment considered above, that there must be polygyny because there are more celestial women than men, sounds on the face of it complimentary to women. But if we reflect a bit, it is simply a way of saying that one good man is in some sense the equivalent of more women than one, however “righteous” those women are compared to the average man. Can one man emotionally and sexually satisfy more than one woman? Or is he capable of being “equally yoked” to more than one woman — spiritually or intellectually or managerially or whatever? In either case, the implications seem to diminish women, reduc­ing them, in some essential way, to less than full equivalence with men.

If we believed that the celestial order would be truly polygamous, allowing either polygyny or polyandry because somehow we would all — men and women — be capable of a “higher,” more inclusive love than could accommo­date various groupings, the case would at least be rational and nonsexist. How­ever, both the historical order Mormons once practiced and the celestial order many Mormons anticipate are purely polygynous. They accept in the eternal marriage unit only plural wives, not plural husbands. Since there is no good reason to believe that polygyny will be needed to accommodate an excess of women in the celestial kingdom, then the expectation that there will be plural wives but not plural husbands cannot help but imply fundamental inequalities between men and women that have to do with their most central qualities and feelings, those involving sexual and spiritual identity and relationships (such as the insulting concept discussed above, that women are needed chiefly as birth machines for spirit children).

I believe we can remove that vague implication of inferiority without becoming alienated either from nineteenth-century Mormonism or from our present faith in the gospel and the Church. It is possible and spiritually heal­ing, I believe, to affirm our polygynous ancestors for their obedient sacrifices and courageous achievements, which made the foundations of the restored church secure — and yet to reject the expectation of future polygyny. For too many of us, that expectation undermines the foundations of our present identi­ties as women and men and diverts us from the difficult struggle for complete fidelity in our marriages that the gospel standard of morality and the expecta­tion of celestial marriage as the basis of godhood require.

I do not presume to speak for others. My intent is simply to help free us, as Mormon men and women, to think about our marriages and the future with more openness, less bound to the expectation of future polygyny. Let us not be limited to our past understanding. In the speech I referred to earlier, Elder McConkie observed, “Since the Lord gave this revelation on the priesthood, our understanding of many [scriptures] has expanded. Many of us never imagined or supposed that they had the extensive and broad meaning that they do have” (1982, 152). And though he then discussed only how our understanding of how black and white are “alike unto God” had expanded, I suggest that we also need to consider that our understanding of how men and women are alike and equal unto God may still be narrow, in need of further expansion. Men who have suffered from an unhealthy sense of superiority and women who have felt degraded by the assumption of future polygyny should feel free to seek the inspiration that may help unburden them.

Certainly none of us can presume an exact knowledge of the celestial order and what we will be capable of there, but our whole religion is built on the assumption that this life is, in its essentials, very much like that future life and a direct preparation for it. We have been clearly commanded to try to develop perfect one-to-one fidelity in our marriages here, and in the temple marriage sealing ceremony we have been given, I believe, a clear vision of what the highest future order of marriage will be: It will be a full and equal, one-to-one partnership of a king and a queen, a priestess and a priest, a perfectly balanced and yet dynamic bi-polar union that makes possible “a fulness and a continua­tion of the seeds forever and ever” (D&C 132:19).

Difficult as complete married fidelity and unity is to achieve, there is nothing sweeter on earth than our approximations of it. And we have been given no clear evidence that it will not continue to be the sweetest thing in heaven, the foundation of godhood and a blessing available to all who, freed from this world’s limitations, really want it.

How to cite this essay:

1 Joseph F. Smith, in a discourse in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, 7 July 1878, suggested both the danger of polygyny, a powerful principle “that savors of life unto life, or of death unto death,” if it were misunderstood or misused and that he understood it was applicable “when commanded and not otherwise” and was “particularly adapted to the conditions and necessities . . . the circumstances, responsibilities, and personal, as well as vicarious duties of the people of God in this age of the world” (JD 20:26).

The Melchizedek Priesthood holds the right from the eternal God, and not by descent from father and mother; and that priesthood is as eternal as God Himself, hav­ing neither beginning of days nor end of life.

The 2nd Priesthood is Patriarchal authority. Go to and finish the temple, and God will fill it with power, and you will then receive more knowledge concerning this priesthood.

The 3rd is what is called the Levitical Priesthood, consisting of priests to administer in outward ordinances, made without an oath; but the Priesthood of Melchizedek is by an oath and covenant.

]]>http://www.eugeneengland.org/on-fidelity-polygamy-and-celestial-marriage/feed5Blessing the Chevrolethttp://www.eugeneengland.org/blessing-the-chevrolet
http://www.eugeneengland.org/blessing-the-chevrolet#commentsWed, 26 Oct 2011 21:31:27 +0000http://www.eugeneengland.org/?p=898…. For a moment Abijah felt stunned; in this, his first real emergency, he had almost forgotten God!

He turned to Brother Tuckett.

Clory, sitting on a boulder near-by, wondered at the sudden purpose in Brother Tuckett’s movements. What were they going to do? And then she saw Brother Tuckett appear with the bottle of consecrated sweet oil. She heard Lon say, ‘You be “Mouth,” Brother Abijah,’ and the full significance of the scene burst upon her. Why, they were preparing for ‘the laying on of hands’! For Abijah would have to be ‘Mouth’ since he held the higher priesthood! She sat up in horror. Administering to an ox!

She saw Melanchton Tuckett rub the oil between the animal’s red ears and then both he and Abijah rest their hands, one over the other, on its head.

‘We unitedly lay our hands upon thy head, O ox . . . this oil which has been dedicated and consecrated and set apart for the healing of the sick in the household of faith. . .’

Bewilderedly Clory grasped the fact that this prayer had all the earnest supplication of the ceremony performed for any ailing human being.

…. Clory watched him calmly speak to the ox. Opening its eyes, it stared at the men with its gentle, liquid gaze. She was not greatly surprised when it scrambled to its feet.

Maurine Whipple, The Giant Joshua

AT VARIOUS TIMES I have heard and read, with mild curiosity, of the anointing of animals by the power of the priesthood in pioneer times, but it wasn’t until I found myself with my own hands placed in blessing on the hood of my Chevrolet that I really felt what that experience meant to those early Saints, who depended on their animals, as we do our cars, for quite crucial things.

About this Article

One of England’s classic essays, it is referred to many times by both England and commentators. Its central message is a reminder for us to ask for and then acknowledge the Lord’s hand in all things. Originally published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9, no. 3 (Autum 1974), 57–60.

One evening last fall, Charlotte and I drove about sixty miles to visit a young couple in our branch, converts of a few years who had slipped into inactivity and growing doubt but were now trying to rebuild their faith. We had supper and a good visit and gave a blessing to their new daughter who had been ill for some time with a vague disorder that kept her crying severely for long stretches. When we tried to return home the car would not start. We managed to push it to the only garage in that small town just before it closed and were told that the trouble was apparently a broken timing gear which would take about two days to order and install. Our young friends lent us their car to drive to our home and bring back when we came for ours. When I phoned to check two days later I was told that the timing gear was installed but for some reason the car would not start; I drove over anyway and tried to help, but as the afternoon wore on and we tried all kinds of variations of the timing apparatus, plugs, etc., we could only get an occasional rough chug and some backfiring. The mechanic finally said he was afraid he would have to tear out the new timing gear and check it, which would take well into the next day. But I had to be back home to conduct an important Branch meeting that night, and when my anxiety reached a certain point, I found that it was quite natural, while the mechanic was helping at the gas pumps out front, to literally place my hands on the car and give it a blessing, explaining to the Lord that I was about His work, that my branch needed me, and I needed some extraordinary help to get there. The mechanic came back, made another adjustment, and half-heartedly tried the starter again for the hundredth time. So help me, I was not even surprised when, after a few mild growls, the engine started. The mechanic was incredulous and insisted on a test drive before he would let me go; after a few miles the engine was still running quite rough but he agreed that I could probably get home and then have it tuned up some more later—and I was off. It was only on the long ride back that I became properly aware of what had happened, was amazed, and gave thanks.

I have had many occasions to bless my wife and my children and have not been surprised to see them healed, against all the odds, or relax from pain into peace or sleep under my very hands. And on a couple of occasions when we had car trouble during our many trips back to Utah from California or Minnesota they have suggested that we pray for help and it has seemed to come. I now remember, while on a little used Nevada back road in early spring, driving onto the shoulder to look at some flowers, finding myself stuck in hub deep mud, and after a family prayer, inexplicably making it back up on the pavement. And a number of times, following such a prayer, we have limped across hundreds of miles of desert or a nighttime of closed stations with leaking radiators or worn bearings or something else that should have stopped us. But those things have occurred in fairly naturalistic ways that I sort of took for granted—as nice experiences for my children but nothing miraculous—and haven’t thought much about until recently, when I started blessing my Chevrolet.

I was off. It was only on the long ride back that I became properly aware of what had happened, was amazed, and gave thanks.

At Christmas this year we visited our folks in Utah and on our way home noticed there was a certain nagging mushiness when we tried to accelerate and also that a noisy muffler was getting louder. Crossing South Dakota on a Saturday afternoon we found few mechanics available, but finally one took time to look at the car and found a dirty fuel filter, which he replaced, and a loose tailpipe connection, which he tightened and wired together so it couldn’t work loose again. When the car still had no pickup—in fact, seemed worse—he took a look at the mileage (84,000) and cheerfully declared that the transmission was probably going ($400), but I could probably make it home. We started out again but found that now we couldn’t get up over 40 miles an hour on the level, could barely make it over those infinitesimal variations in the landscape they call hills in South Dakota, and were getting about three miles per gallon. I calculated that even if things didn’t get worse it would take us well into Sunday to get home and we would probably run out of money for gas before then or stall on one of the (comparative) mountains of Minnesota. And if things did get worse, we could be marooned on the South Dakota prairie (fairly dangerous in January) or at best stuck in some motel until Monday when someone might be able to put in a new transmission—except that we couldn’t pay for it.

Suddenly I found myself gripping the wheel with a special intensity and giving the car a blessing again. I told the Lord that my family was in danger and that our Branch needed us the next day and it was time once more for some special help. I felt impressed to take the next exit, which led us to a town some distance from the freeway, and without any surprise felt directed to a certain station. The owner looked things over, disconnected a vacuum tube, and had me drive off for a test. There was no change and I went back disappointed and for the first time surprised.

But the station owner greeted me with a grin and said, “I’ll bet I know what the problem is; I heard it as you drove off.” He put the car on the hoist and soon found out he was right. Disconnecting the tailpipe at the place the previous mechanic had wired it, he pushed a hose down it and found that the inner wall had collapsed almost shut. He explained that my Chevrolet was from one of those few years when they had experimented with double-walled tailpipes. Sometimes, in the extremes of heat and cold of the upper Midwest that inner wall collapses, shutting off the exhaust and producing symptoms much like a bad transmission or an engine that needs overhauling. In fact, the reason he recognized the problem for what it was is that a friend of his had, just the month before, wasted $500 on his engine before he discovered that he had this very problem. The only reason I had been getting any power was because the pressure had forced the tailpipe connection loose so that the exhaust could escape there; and when the previous mechanic had wired that so it couldn’t force open, the engine’s power was shut down. I found myself quite calm, without surprise, as he told me these things, without anxiety when he was unable to locate a new tailpipe at that late hour on Saturday but then barely caught one supply house in time to get a length of some flexible pipe and some clamps and managed to cut out the curved section where the collapse was and clamp in the flex-pipe securely enough for us to get home.

I do not understand fully why or how the Lord does these things—though I know He does. In fact, if I think about it much, there are difficulties: How about our free agency and our need to learn to solve our own problems and be maturely independent—not like infants always asking for help? How fit all this with the Lord’s assurances that He makes His sun and rain to come down equally on all His children—the just and the unjust? How about all that suffering, apparently uninterrupted by God, in the Sub-Sahara famine, Southeast Asia’s constant bloodshed, the animal-like packs of deserted children in South American cities, the emotional destruction during slow death in American nursing homes? Couldn’t God have veered the typhoon that killed thousands in Bangladesh or the earthquake that killed thousands in Iran as well as guide the mechanic to straighten out the timing on my Chev or me to someone who could cure my car? I don’t know. Perhaps it has something to do with God guiding people rather than interfering with nature; perhaps it has something to do with His being asked in faith and for reasons that have to do with His most important purposes, which aren’t just keeping people alive but saving their souls. Yet He seems mysteriously selective about helping there as well. And of course, even when He does clearly respond it isn’t always the way we want or expect. In that almost too painfully moving autobiographical account, “The Death of a Son” by Carole Hansen, that appeared in Dialogue (Autumn 1967), we were powerfully reminded that God, in response to a priesthood blessing, can give assurance and peace, even to the point of being misunderstood—and then eventually can give conviction of His care and the child’s ultimate welfare—without giving what parents emotionally want most, the child’s life. Again, I don’t know why or how.

All I really know is that I continue to ask blessings and to see them given. Last week our Branch held a special fast and had a prayer session for the four-year-old daughter of some friends of one of our members: she had to come from Colorado for extremely dangerous heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic to correct a congenital defect. The parents had lived with the specter of losing this child for four years as she grew into a poignantly frail elfin joy while they waited for her to be old enough to risk the operation, and they had fasted each week over the past months as the time grew close. They had been told the chances were about 50-50, but somehow none of us was surprised when the last exploratory catheterization at the Clinic revealed the condition less serious than had been supposed and when (after an anointing by her father and a local Rochester Branch brother) the operation went extremely well and she was up and skittering around after only a few days in intensive care. Last fall I felt moved to give a special blessing to a dear and extremely capable friend who was suffering anxiety and self-reproach under the pressure of his professional responsibilities and the possibility of failing his family and himself by not meeting them, and I had no doubt that the Lord would bless him with the measure of self-confidence he needed to succeed, as He did. And yesterday a faithful, long-suffering father and I were suddenly called out of our Sunday School preparation meeting to find his child in the chapel having a severe seizure. (She has had a condition from birth that causes a reaction, at entirely unpredictable moments.) As the father took her in his arms and held her jaw so she wouldn’t bite her tongue, I placed my hands on her head and through the power of the priesthood rebuked the uncontrolled shaking of her entire body. As I continued to stroke her head, the shaking quickly quieted, and then we carried her to the car to be taken home to rest and I returned to explain to those who had been present what had happened and to ask their prayers for her.

The opportunities, the needs, come often, and the Lord’s response forms a bright thread in the texture of gospel living. But I don’t fully understand why or how. I only know that I continue to ask—and to acknowledge the Lord’s hand in all things.

How to cite this essay:

]]>http://www.eugeneengland.org/blessing-the-chevrolet/feed2“No Cause, No Cause”: An Essay Toward Reconciliationhttp://www.eugeneengland.org/%e2%80%9cno-cause-no-cause%e2%80%9d-an-essay-toward-reconciliation
http://www.eugeneengland.org/%e2%80%9cno-cause-no-cause%e2%80%9d-an-essay-toward-reconciliation#commentsWed, 26 Oct 2011 18:00:47 +0000http://www.eugeneengland.org/?p=882WHEN I WAS quite young, I had two profound spiritual experiences, more like encounters, that became the grounding realities of my life. One convinced me of the personal reality of the Savior and that what he most fundamentally requires of us is total consecration of our means, our time, and our talents in service to others; it provided a touchstone of feeling by which I have measured all moral and religious matters since—that is, I came to judge whether something was from the Savior by its resonance with that feeling. The other experience convinced me of the divine mission of the Church and the divine appointment, by Jesus Christ, of the apostles and prophets who direct the Church. Though those convictions have matured in comprehension and have been sorely tried, they have never betrayed me nor left me.

One of the interesting results of those experiences is that I became both a conservative and a liberal and both orthodox and unorthodox. The first experience centered me in the central, orthodox, gospel principles of faith in Christ unto repentance and the necessary and infinite Atonement. It also moved me toward increasing focus on what are, in our culture, considered liberal and therefore unorthodox, even suspect, causes—despite Christ’s emphasis on them. I mean causes such as more equal consumption of world resources, justice for minority or dispossessed peoples, opposition to all wars.

About this Article

This is a speech that was delivered to the BYU English department in 1997, six months before Gene retired from the university. Published posthumously in Sunstone, January 2002, 31–39.

The second experience gave me a firm, conservative confidence in the Church and its leaders as well as the gospel, such that I have never felt any need to avoid difficult issues or to simply accept culturally prescribed boundaries. I have felt able to explore our history without fear, to examine troubling questions of doctrine and Church practice, to face squarely the humanness of our leaders. Because I have had supreme confidence that the gospel, the Church, and our leaders were true and could pass any test. I also felt that the prophets had called us to make those tests from the Apostle Paul’s “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good,” to Joseph Smith’s “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.”

Elder Marion D. Hanks, soon after he was called into the Seventy, told a group of us institute students at the University of Utah that if the gospel were not true, he would want to be the first to know, and so he must always be willing to look at all the evidence. I loved his conservative confidence and liberal openness.

These were ravishing, liberating ideas to me, but they fit easily with the basically conservative lifestyle and political views I shared with my parents. And, to their everlasting credit, my parents, as well as my teachers, responded to the liberal ideas and smart aleck challenges and behaviors I sometimes indulged in by talking with me about them, rather than simply dismissing the ideas or condemning me with a label.

Of course, my center of gravity has shifted between these poles of liberal and conservative at different times and with different parts of my being. In my teenage years, fine teachers—and my father at home—exposed me to the great liberal concepts in our theology: that we have existed co-eternally with God and can grow to be like him and continue creating and learning and adventuring together in realms beyond our imaginations; that the same “sociality” will exist there between us; that sin and repentance are a natural process of growth initiated by Adam and Eve and made possible by the teachings, example, and atoning, unconditional love of our Savior; that evil is neither God’s creation nor his will but an unavoidable result of God not being omnipotent and having to set up the adventure of growth in a universe of natural law and moral agents who have genuine freedom.

These were ravishing, liberating ideas to me, but they fit easily with the basically conservative lifestyle and political views I shared with my parents. And, to their everlasting credit, my parents, as well as my teachers, responded to the liberal ideas and smart aleck challenges and behaviors I sometimes indulged in by talking with me about them, rather than simply dismissing the ideas or condemning me with a label. I avoided the all-too-common rebellion of adolescents against the Church that occurs as part of a rebellion against authoritarian parents and teachers—because, however conservative, they treated me liberally.

My twenties were a more conservative period. I married a saint [Ed note from Charlotte: Not!], which tends to help anyone focus his or her life on central, conservative values. Charlotte and I went, soon after we were married, on a mission to Samoa and concentrated, for two and a half years, on teaching the fundamentals of the gospel and seeing lives change profoundly as a result. We started our family, which confirmed us, through experience, in conservative family values, and I served three years as a weather officer in the Air Force, which confirmed me in patriotism. But I felt powerful liberal currents developing as well.

Coming from rather cold, emotionally reserved, largely Anglo-Saxon families and Church culture, Charlotte and I were positively bowled over by the passionate openness and directness of much Polynesian culture. I felt what I imagine being inebriated is like at its best—emotionally freed and elated—and I had a huge culture shock coming back to Salt Lake in the middle of winter to emotional bleakness and reserve. On the other hand, I once saw a Samoan man, insane with rage, chasing his son with a huge rock over his head—and I intervened. You who know Samoans may think I was as crazy as he was and wonder how I survived, but I was young and new in Samoa—and, as it turned out, my alien appearance and high cultural standing as a missionary shocked the man into immobility and probably saved the boy’s life as well as my own.

As I reflected on those experiences, I realized more and more that culture is relative, not absolute, that Mormons can have quite different cultural ways, some better, some worse than those of others but mainly different—and that the quality of our religious life is not obviously a function of cultural values. That may seem obvious, but it was a revelation to me. Mormon culture right now seems far from this understanding of cultural relativism, and yet I believe such understanding is a key, perhaps the most important key, to renewal of this department. But more of that later.

As I said, I was a patriotic American. In fact, our squadron of F-100 fighter-bombers was alerted a few times in 1961 for service in Vietnam. But we didn’t go, and I left the Air Force and went to Stanford for graduate work. There, only three years later, I experienced a profound paradigm shift. I had believed, with a certainty that was complete and religious, that the U.S. Constitution had been inspired by God, that our government therefore was essentially Christian, devoted to goodness and truth, and directed by God in its purposes and actions. In particular, I had believed our presidents were sincere and truthful.

On 4 August 1964, our government announced that North Korean gunboats had twice attacked an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that consequently we had bombed Hanoi and were greatly increasing our buildup of American troops. At the Stanford library, I had been reading reports and analyses in periodicals from around the world—not just American sources—of what was happening in Vietnam. I had become increasingly uneasy about our policies and now became convinced (as was later admitted) that our government was lying about the “Tonkin Gulf Incident”—and suddenly my whole world shifted. For me, being convinced that a president had lied and that our government was willing to deceive us and kill people far away, in my name and using my taxes—for what seemed more and more an unworthy and unjust cause—was a life-changing experience.

I became involved in the Graduate Student Coordinating Council, Stanford’s version of the Free Speech Movement that had developed at Berkeley just across the Bay We published a newsletter, organized anti-war rallies, and worked to pass local fair-housing laws. We talked a lot about how the university itself, in its involvement in military research and tendency to support the status quo, especially through authoritarian educational methods, might be contributing directly to such evils as militarism and racism.

I began to learn how the conservatism of some Mormons could lead them to act in destructive ways because it would keep them from seeing that their ideologies were culturally constructed and relative, not doctrinal and absolute. Some of the most prominent Palo Alto landlords were Mormons and took it as a religious affront that I would campaign to get them to rent to blacks. I taught institute part-time, where we discussed some of these matters quite thoroughly in a Mormon Ethics class. The parents of one of my students, who had applied for conscientious objector status, blamed me for his supposedly going astray. They contacted Institute authorities in Provo, who directed me not to talk about the ethics of violence, if I wanted to keep my job.

Yet I was, of course, still basically conservative. I helped start Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought for the express purpose of helping young LDS students, like those I taught each day at Stanford, build and preserve their testimonies. I know they faced many academic and ethical and cultural challenges, of the kind that going to college and moving away from Mormon cultural centers inevitably brings. I served in the Stanford Ward bishopric and there also was fully engaged in building testimonies and teaching basically conservative values.

As I served in these capacities, I saw more and more how relative are the terms liberal and conservative. I found I change from one to the other simply by walking across Stanford Avenue from the university to the Institute building. On campus, among graduate students and anti-war and civil- rights activists, I was that strange, non-smoking, short-haired, family-raising conservative; at the Institute, I was that strange liberal who renounced war and worried about fair-housing and free speech. Of course, I was the same person both places; those terms reduced me to a stereotype, often marginalized me, and sometimes caused me real harm—but they did not touch my real self.

I learned how powerful though absurd cultural shibboleths can be as totalizing, stereotyping mechanisms. One day, while we worked on anti-war posters, a graduate student friend said to me, “You’ve got to let your hair grow long, to show which side you’re on.” That very evening, a Church leader said to me, “Gene, you’ve got to keep your hair short and always do your home teaching, to show you’re really OK despite your liberal ideas.”

Well, I was getting some liberal ideas, but the most powerful ones came from apostles. During this time, I heard Elder Harold B. Lee announce that “the activities of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are a continuing revelation against the sub-standard conditions of society.” I assumed he meant non-Mormon society and focused my efforts, which were informed fully by the gospel and my Church experience, on changing the racism and violence in American society It wasn’t until ten years later, when President Kimball spoke out against the sub-standard materialism and militarism of Mormons, that I realized Elder Lee may have meant our society as well.

It was also during this time that I got to know President Hugh B. Brown. Intriguingly, he and President N. Eldon Tanner, both of the First Presidency, were Democrats. I had grown up with that mistaken idea that Mormons were naturally Republicans for bona fide religious rather than cultural reasons. Years later, I read with great interest in President Brown’s memoirs that when he had come from Canada in 1928 and was deciding which party to join, President Heber J. Grant and Elder B. H. Roberts, staunch Democrats, counseled him, “If I wanted to belong to a party that represented the common people, I should become a Democrat, but that if I wanted to be popular and have the adulation of others and be in touch with the wealth of the nation, I should become a Republican.” President Brown reflects on that choice, which he realizes has put him “in the minority—almost a minority of one—among the General Authorities, since most of them are now Republicans. But . . . as time goes on I become more and more convinced that the Democrats have the right philosophy. . . Theirs is the party of progress.”

What does all this mean? Only that I was learning that political and cultural differences don’t matter to the Lord, and that we err mightily when we try to make them matter. President Brown was not afraid to make this clear by letting political differences among the Brethren show. Elder Ezra Taft Benson was an outspoken conservative on many issues and lent at least tacit support to the John Birch Society’s attacks on the United Nations. President Brown came to BW in May 1969 and defended the UN and then went on to discuss “freedom of the mind” as one of the “dangerous” but essential freedoms the UN was helping to preserve:

One cannot think right without running the risk of thinking wrong, but generally more thinking is the antidote for the evils that spring from wrong thinking. . . .And we call upon you students to exercise your God-given right to think through on every proposition that is submitted to you and be unafraid to express your opinions, with proper respect for those to whom you talk and proper acknowledgment of your own shortcomings. . . . We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts.

We have come a long and unfortunate way in nearly thirty years, it seems, from such a clear call for openness and recognition of cultural relativism to a time when many students seem afraid to think, certainly to speak, for fear of being wrong—or merely unorthodox or “inappropriate.” Now, even faculty are being chosen and tenured with what looks like more concern for their cultural orthodoxy than anything else. But I may simply be wrong about that, and my main concern today is to consider some ways to talk to each other when we think someone is wrong—whether an opponent or ourselves.

Here’s a positive example: When I was released from the Stanford Ward bishopric and Charlotte and I first began to attend the Palo Alto Ward, we were asked to speak in sacrament meeting. I bore my testimony about how the gospel impelled and guided me in various efforts to improve our society. The next Sunday, in testimony meeting, one of the ward members used a good portion of the time to rebut me point by point, implying that I must not really have a testimony if I believed such “liberal” things about social action.

I was hurt and angry, ready to respond in kind. But, with Charlotte’s pointed help, I restrained myself, thought things over for a while, and fasted and prayed for the ability to respond ethically to my opponent rather than to justify myself. When I went to his house, it was awkward and painful at first—he defensive, me still smarting—but I persevered until I could apologize sincerely for offending him and could express my feelings and faith in ways he could understand and accept. He became one of my closest friends in the ward, a regular, outspoken opponent in the Gospel Doctrine class I was asked to teach. Though he disagreed with me about many things, he was willing to improve the dialogue and learning in my class through gracious opposition, because he knew my basically conservative faithfulness.

That’s a fairly obvious process I sort of stumbled into, dragging my feet, but, of course, it’s right there in scriptures: (1) reprove, but only when moved upon by the Holy Ghost (D&C 121:43); (2) if offended, go to the offender and discuss it between him and thee alone (D&C 42:88); (3) in either case, “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15) and show forth afterwards “an increase of love . . . lest he esteem thee to be his enemy; that he may know that thy faithfulness is stronger than the cords of death (D&C 121:43–44). Simple and sensible as all that is, we have violated each of those principles recently in our [BYU English] department and are continuing to suffer the results—and will, I think, until we repent and forgive.

When I left Palo Alto to become Dean of Academic Affairs at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, I learned even more clearly how important those principles are. Within a week of arriving, I was called as president of the little branch in that area and in the next five years learned in new ways the values of conservative religion and Church involvement. At Stanford, much of my religious life had been involved with understanding and defending the gospel and applying it to social questions. I had been mainly idealistic, abstract, and critical—in a word, liberal. Now I was in charge of twenty families scattered over seventy-five miles, ranging from Utah-born, hard-core “inactives” with devastating marital problems to bright-eyed converts with no jobs or with a drunken father who beat them. Of the seventy or so members I got to know, at most four or five were ones I would ever have chosen for friends when I was at Stanford—and with whom I could have easily shared my most impassioned political and religious concerns and views, the ones that had so exercised me before.

Fortunately with Charlotte’s good advice and prodding, I did not begin by preaching about my ideas or promoting my crusades. I tried very hard to see what the immediate problems and concerns of my flock were and to be a good pastor, one who fed and protected them.

As I did that, a remarkable thing happened. After six months, I found that my branch members, at first properly suspicious of a liberal intellectual from California, had come to feel in their bones, from direct experience, that indeed my faith and faithfulness to them was “stronger than the cords of death.” And the promise of the scriptures followed, for there flowed to me “without compulsory means” (D&C 121:36) the power from the Holy Ghost to talk about any of my concerns and passions and to be understood and trusted, even if not agreed with. I only wish I could have found a way to be that successful in my stewardship at BYU.

In 1975, while still at St. Olaf, I was invited to BYU to give an address. As I approached the campus at the old main entrance on 12th North, I saw the university motto boldly spelled out in bright letters: ENTER TO LEARN; GO FORTH TO SERVE. I felt a deep shock of recognition, and my heart said to me: “This is home. This is where I belong.” If BYI.J really took such a motto seriously, I thought, it could well be the greatest university in the world—at least in God’s eyes. When I had an opportunity to join the faculty here two years later, many of my liberal friends were amazed that I would come to a place they had stereotyped as repressive. But I believed I would be freer here to discuss openly the religious and ethical perspectives that I think are essential to understanding great literature well, and to express clearly and openly my personal convictions, which I think is crucial to good teaching.

As it turned out, I have felt much freer here, in the important ways, than I did at the University of Utah or Stanford or even St. Olaf College, but there have also been problems—mainly related to our confusion about the proper place of our conservative or liberal ideologies. In twenty years, I have gone from being totalized and attacked for being a conservative to being totalized and attacked for being a liberal—yet, I’m still the same person. It’s BYU, including our department, that has changed—from being somewhat too secular to being somewhat too sectarian, from being somewhat liberal to being quite conservative. And that wouldn’t matter at all, except that in both cases there have been some who insisted on political correctness and who have turned relative cultural values into religious absolutes with which to attack, punish, or exclude people.

When I applied here, some on the hiring committee rejoiced that an obviously liberal founder of Dialogue was coming to shake up the administration and conservative student body. [William A,] Bert Wilson told them they would be surprised, but to no avail, and I was hired. Then, when it turned out I was really a conservative, who had prayer in classes and believed the Church is as true as the gospel, a provincial who offered a book on Brigham Young as part of my scholarship when I applied for promotion and who wanted the department to teach more of our own Mormon heritage and culture through Mormon literature, I was attacked and punished. Now, twenty years later, I find myself labeled a liberal, publicly attacked and privately punished, not for violating the academic freedom document prescriptions against criticizing Church leaders or opposing Church doctrine, but for violating cultural taboos that are mistakenly made into religious issues: for publicly opposing war, for exposing my own and other Mormons’ racism and sexism, even for teaching nationally honored but liberal Mormon writers.

And that, of course, brings us to the difficult part of this essay, where I try to talk straight about my weaknesses and ours. But first, a seventh inning stretch: Many of Einstein’s greatest insights came through what he called “thought experiments”—not real physical experiments but imagined situations, like elevators traveling at the speed of light, in which he could think through new possibilities. I need some volunteers. Suppose you two on the front row are siblings; you put this book on your head and walk by, showing off a bit; you accidentally on purpose trip her. Now stop right there, and imagine what likely follows. The tripped person hits the one who tripped, that person hits back harder to make certain there is justice, then the other hits back even harder for revenge, and so on until there is crying—or intervention by parents.

Actually, this is not an “experiment,” because we’ve all been through it many times in some form. What it illustrates, in miniature, is how almost all wars begin and grow, how any human conflict tends always to involve imitative violence and to escalate as we pursue what we think is the most worthy goal—justice. The anthropologist-turned-literary critic Rene Girard has best explicated this human process, especially as it is revealed in the works of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. He helps us understand, for instance, that Hamlet is not simply a witty, attractive, essentially good man, tragically betrayed by his melancholic tendency to put things off, but a victim of and then participant in cycles of escalating violence that began the day he is born, when Hamlet’s father kills rival old Fortinbras in a duel and takes his lands. The cycles build as, about the time we hear young Fortinbras is seeking revenge, the ghost of Hamlet’s father infects him with his own spirit of rivalry and revenge, and those cycles conclude with young Fortinbras taking over the defenseless kingdom, whose royalty has been reduced to a pile of corpses by Hamlet’s quest for revenge.

The inevitable results of Hamlet’s revenge are clear enough, of course, from the scriptures and the prophets. Christ tells us that “all those who take the sword, shall perish by the sword.” The LDS First Presidency declared in 1942, after quoting that statement above: “There is an eternal law that rules war and those who engage in it. . . . The Savior laid down a universal principle upon which He placed no limitations as to time, place, cause, or people involved [whether righteous or wicked]. . . . This is a universal law, for force always begets force.” Violence of any kind, a blow at a sibling, a label or accusation intended to hurt or punish or exclude or demonize, a response in anger, a refusal to give forgiveness or accept an apology, an act to exclude someone who is hard to get along with—all these are wrong because they tend to produce reaction in kind and thus make war rather than peace. We will never, I believe, solve our problems and fulfill our great mission, until we learn “a more excellent way”—and that more excellent way, of course, is charity, the pure love of Christ.

Paul tells us that “charity suffereth long, and is kind, . . . is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil” (I Cor. 13:4–5) .We have been quick to see evil and seek punishment. We liberals sometimes forget that, if we have not charity, we can bestow all our goods to feed the poor and it is nothing. We conservatives sometimes forget that prophecies fail, knowledge vanishes away, but charity endures, that it is even greater than faith and hope-certainly greater than political or cultural correctness.

And that takes me back to my main theme, which I’m sure you see by now is to deconstruct the polarity of “conservative” and “liberal.” What is most heartbreaking—most genuinely tragic about what we have done to each other in the ways I have described above—is that we have done all this for something quite trivial. I mean our tendency to insist on our liberal or conservative political or cultural values as if they were religious absolutes. They are not.

“Conservative” and “liberal” are (or at least should be) merely neutral terms describing two different approaches to questions of social organization or cultural emphasis—approaches that may be simply a matter of temperament. Conservatives tend to want to maintain existing institutions or views, to oppose change, preserve safe boundaries, take few risks. At their best, I believe, they are, like Captain Vere in Billy Budd, of steady integrity, unswayed by every wind of doctrine; in Irving Howe’s words, “not inclined to easily overthrow the human institutions and values won from the blood and mire of history.” The word liberal derives from the Latin “to set free” and means “pertaining to a free man.” Liberals tend to value freedom from the authority of tradition and autocratic institutions, from bigotry or narrow-mindedness, even freedom from orthodoxy and conventional external restraints imposed on private conscience. They seek change. At their best, they are like those in Alma 1:30, who “did not set their hearts upon riches; therefore they were liberal to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, whether out of the church or in the church.”

I see nothing here to indicate religious superiority either way Indeed, as I have tried to show, both the gospel and the Church include many elements that could be characterized as liberal (such as our concepts of the nature and the destiny of human beings and continuing revelation and our lay organization) and many that could be called conservative (such as our code of personal morality and our strong loyalty to our leaders). Joseph Smith was certainly a liberal, Brigham Young and Spencer W. Kimball very interesting mixtures, Ezra Taft Benson a conservative, and Gordon B. Hinckley gloriously indecipherable.

So why are we shaking ourselves apart over something so relative and relatively insignificant—differences between us that could actually be a source of strength if we would combine them positively and learn from each other through dialogue? Some of us have thought feminism would save the Church, and others have thought themselves called to save the Church from feminism. Both positions are wrong, and both have done harm. For one thing, both have called the others fascists, constructed them as enemies, and produced escalating violence. Some have thought the newer criticisms, with their ethical passion and inclination to social and political action, are God’s own means to shake up our provincial students and our moribund, irrelevant curriculum; others have thought the new ways the devil’s own tools to corrupt our curriculum and the Church. Both are wrong, I believe.

The newer criticisms’ liberal inclination to social and political activism certainly seems no more dangerous than the older criticisms’ conservative inclination to ignore the ethical and political implications of literature and thus to reinforce, rather than call into question, the values of the Western culture it usually focuses on. Brian doesn’t like the new criticisms because he is, in some ways, a conservative; Phil likes them because he is, in some ways, a liberal. Fine, let’s discuss, argue, try to understand, work out some compromises in curriculum and hiring—and live in peace by making our differences a strength.

In 1987, the two-hundredth anniversary of the writing, of the U. S. constitution, I studied it and its creation carefully, partly because I was worried about the passionate religious divisiveness over political ideology that was already festering in the national culture wars and was appearing on the horizon at BYU. By studying William Peters’s book on the making of the constitution and Daniel Bell’s analysis of what he calls our “Constitutional culture”—one that is buttressed by checks and balances, including the two-party system—I gained a testimony of the genius and the divine inspiration behind our system.

James Madison, especially, understood the danger of a majority uniting behind a common interest or passion, particularly a religious one, and becoming as dictatorial as a king, inclined to ignore minority rights and even to enforce private morality and cultural conformity on matters, such as what we eat and drink and how we worship, that are not the business of government. When Daniel Bell spoke at BYU that year, he stated clearly, knowing well his audience, “Cultural conservatives should be political liberalism—that is, we who want to be free to practice our particularly personal moral and religious values that do not directly harm others should help make certain we have a system in which all have that freedom. We Mormons were the victims of one of the greatest failures of our government to abide by those principles, when conservative Republicans led a national effort to destroy the Church for practicing something that was entirely unharmful to others (and thus not a matter of law) but which induced in conservative Victorian society a huge cultural cringe—I mean, of course, polygamy.

When polygamy officially ended in 1890, and the Church moved to attain statehood and become an accepted part of the nation, our Church leaders were concerned that all Mormons would become Democrats and continue the volatile religious-political factionalism of the 1880s. They tried to avoid this by dividing Mormon towns and congregations, by direct assignment, into half Republicans, half Democrats. They explained themselves in a letter to their astonished Democrat friends in Washington: “The more evenly balanced the parties become the safer it will be for us [Mormons] in the security of our liberties; and . . . our influence for good will be far greater than it possibly could be were either party overwhelmingly in the majority.” That, I believe, is divine wisdom of exactly the kind Daniel Bell sees in our Constitutional culture. It applies to politics in Utah today as much as it did a hundred years ago, though now the danger is not Democrat but Republican one-party rule, confused with religious righteousness.

This principle applies directly to our department problems, as well. In our political system, if the checks and balances, including at least two parties in constant dialogue and competition and compromise, are believed in and kept strong, there can be a process of government that is a much surer guarantee of our liberties and of finding better answers to our problems than if we had to depend only on the content of any one person’s or party’s ideas. Good Democrats or good Republicans are not those who believe their party has all truth and who lust for complete victory and one-party government control. Rather, they are those who seek what interparty dialogue makes possible: civil discourse, compromise, mutually enlightening debate, and the checks on natural aggrandizement or imposition of purely cultural values on others. In our department, if we can really believe the essay by Walter Lippman, “The Indispensable Opposition” (that we still, I hope, assign our students), we will recognize that “We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say . . . because freedom of discussion improves our own opinions” and can develop some peaceful processes of disagreement that improve our own thinking. We might even come to realize that we learn most from those who disagree with us and be willing to stay together and rejoice in our diversity as conservatives and moderates (with one or two liberals). But first we must stop lusting to impose our liberal or conservative beliefs on others as if they were religious absolutes—and especially stop rejecting or trying to punish in religious or academic ways those who are merely different from us in cultural perspective.

At this point, I had planned to go on with some very specific accounts of mistakes I and others have made that illustrate my general points. In fact, I wrote over ten pages of such stuff-and felt more and more depressed. I was dwelling on my hurts and my resentments over friends who have been terribly hurt, judging, lashing out about offenses in ways that I deplore and that would probably have escalated the violence in our department in the way Girard has described for us—the way of our two siblings here in the thought experiment. I have fasted and prayed to be effective rather than to justify myself, and as I worked on elaborating offenses, I did indeed sense the Spirit was fleeing. I love you all, even those who have publicly attacked and sorely hurt me, and I genuinely want to forgive and have peace. I have been invited to put my hands in blessing on the heads of some of you, and I have felt the preciousness of your souls and the love our Heavenly Parents have for you and, I believe, for all in this department. I do not wish to violate that sacred feeling.

However, I believe in the principle implied in the title of the commission empowered to try to heal the bitter divisions that still plague South Africa. It is called “Truth and Reconciliation,” and I believe it’s hard to have one without the other. I pray that we will have the courage to establish some regular forums for Truth and Reconciliation, where all of us, conservative or liberal, who feel they have been hurt or are offended by the actions, teachings, writings, or allegations of others, will stand before us, tell the truth as best they can, and genuinely seek reconciliations. There is not really time for much of that today, but I think it’s essential, that if we don’t do it, we’ll have wasted all our efforts at restructuring and will tend to revert to old patterns that hurt each other and thwart our great potential.

I teach the Atonement in every class because I find it explored in all great literature and because the mercy it embodies is the only answer to the imitative violence which is our greatest human plague. I teach King Lear as Shakespeare’s answer to the question he poses in Hamlet and elsewhere—how can we learn to deal with offenses, even violence, in ways other than in the escalating, self-defeating cycles of revenge? Shakespeare clearly wants us to think of Cordelia as a Christ figure (she says, “It is my father’s business that I go about,” and is referred to as one who “redeems all nature from the general curse that twain have brought her to”), and he has her do two seemingly opposed things that are both part of the Atonement: She confronts Lear in his sins and refuses to go along with them, and she nevertheless continues to love him unconditionally, even while standing in his mind as a continuing reproach. Thus, through mercy, eventually she gives him power to overcome his shame and pride and be reconciled to her in perhaps the greatest scene in all drama: sinner and savior, father and child, kneel to each other, she relinquishing all her very legitimate grievances, saying, “No cause, no cause,” and he saying the magic words of repentance and healing, “I am old and foolish. Forgive and forget.”

When, at the end, Lear clasps Cordelia’s dead body and holds her head up to the audience, saying, “Look, her lips / Look there, look there,” he is not lapsing into senile babbling, ending this greatest of all works of literature in triviality No, he is brealung the fourth wall, speaking directly to us, and calling our attention to the person, the very lips, that taught him the truth and redeemed him through mercy Shakespeare understood the Atonement the way no Christian churches of his time did, but the way the Book of Mormon does—not as a payment to the demands of justice after we have repented, but as a power, given from Christ though his unconditional love and acceptance of us, even in our sins, that enables us to overcome our sins and be at one with him, spiritually and, eventually, literally

I read and teach Levi Peterson—and Orson Scott Card and Terry Tempest Williams—for a couple of reasons, reasons that I should think would impel all of you to at least read and whenever possible teach them too. First, because, as Richard Cracroft keeps reminding us, it makes much more sense for us to become experts in and promote a good literature based in our own heritage and culture, which we already know well, than to spend all our energy on the literature of other cultures, which we are less likely to excel in. Twenty years ago, Henry Nash Smith said the same when we didn’t yet have a small fraction of the amount or quality or national respect for our literature that we have now. His counsel is even more appropriate today.

If I taught at a predominantly Black college, I would want (in fact, as a literature teacher I would feel responsible) to know and whenever possible teach James Baldwin and Tony Morrison, or if at a predominantly Jewish college, Saul Bellow and Chaim Potok, or if at a Catholic college, Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor. You may laugh at these comparisons, but for instance, in his use of grotesques to teach mercy towards “the least of these,” and in his focus on the difficult process of salvation through grace, Levi Peterson approaches O’Connor in subject, method, and effectiveness. He teaches the Atonement better than any Mormon writer and most American writers. And he and Card and Williams are wonderful combinations of liberal and conservative qualities, in some ways less orthodox than us and our students, in some ways (such as opposition to racism and violence, concern for earth and family, focus on the Atonement) more orthodox than many of us. We have much to learn from them, despite, even because of, the cultural cringes they produce—and it is one of the tragic prices we are paying for our current lust for cultural correctness at BYU that these fine Mormon authors are neglected and the study of our own heritage has become suspect because our literature and study of it is sometimes critical of conservative elements in our culture.

Someone said great religious leaders both comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable—as Spencer W Kimball and Ezra Taft Benson surely did. Good teachers also do both—and so do our best Mormon writers, whether conservative or liberal, mantic or sophic, to use Richard Cracroft’s descriptive terms, and we should honor and study the full variety of them and help our students to do so, perhaps especially when we disagree with those writers. I hope at some time in the future, if my proposal to have regular faculty forums is accepted by you, to talk frankly, from my perspective, about some of the issues and allegations, offenses and misunderstandings, that have hurt our department and led to our present efforts at restructuring and renewal. But in this first effort, I will focus on a time I was clearly in error and need forgiveness for.

In July 1992, I went to bid Academic Vice President Stan Albrecht goodbye. I learned from him that one reason he had resigned was his difficulty carrying out university business because of complaints from BYU religion faculty about other faculty members’ writings, made to the Strengthening Church Members Committee, which seemed to him to be an ad hoc middle-management committee that kept files on the writing and activities of certain Church members. I began to think about friends who had been called in to discuss their writing or had actually seen their own file, in one case containing press clippings on their activities as a Young Democrat in college, and my anxiety and pain increased. When a paper at the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium a few weeks later outlined more such incidents, I became convinced that the committee was behind most of them, and in the question-and-answer period, condemned such inquisition-like activity as undermining the Church and BYU, and I invited the audience to use their influence with General Authorities to stop what I assumed was a conservative middle-management group gone out of control. But in my heart was also a desire to punish those who had hurt people I loved. Television cameras captured and replayed the scene on the news; an AP reporter went right out, called a Church spokesman, and got confirmation of the existence of the committee and some of its activities in question, which was reported nationwide.

I went home still angry but increasingly ashamed, aware I had violated the crucial principle that offenses should be dealt with face to face if possible and always in mercy—certainly not in a blanket way without my even knowing who was on the committee. Then, I learned the committee included Elder Faust and Elder Nelson, and I realized I had unwittingly criticized two apostles, as well as others. I bitterly regretted what I had done. I apologized in person to all members of the committee, then to everybody, in a public letter, then to my ward. But I’ve realized that my action may have helped to construct our department in people’s minds as adversarial to the Church and therefore has hurt all of you. I ask you to forgive me.

As you know, our chair, Jay Fox, has worried for some time about the escalating tensions in our department. I suggest we need a Samoan Forgiveness Ceremony But since I couldn’t arrange the full regalia for all that (and besides, I understand that in some versions, there are death threats for any who refuse to be reconciled), let me instead offer a Samoan repentance and reconciliation blessing:

Translation: Beloved Brothers and Sisters. I implore you to repent of your offenses against the mission of this university and the Church, against the spirit of the teachings of Christ, and against each other. I forgive you for all of your offenses against me and ask you to forgive me as well. I ask God to bless us, that if we do these things, he will heal our department of its divisions and wounds and renew us in our ability to do our work well and according to God’s will. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

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]]>http://www.eugeneengland.org/%e2%80%9cno-cause-no-cause%e2%80%9d-an-essay-toward-reconciliation/feed1Brigham and Josephhttp://www.eugeneengland.org/brigham-and-joseph
http://www.eugeneengland.org/brigham-and-joseph#respondWed, 26 Oct 2011 16:57:28 +0000http://www.eugeneengland.org/?p=862WHEN JOSEPH SMITH was born, 172 years ago this December 23, Brigham Young was already an active boy of nearly five, sharing his parents’ struggles for survival on the western frontier. Brigham, like Joseph, was born in Vermont. But in 1803, when Brigham was only two, he was taken to a homestead about 100 miles east of Palmyra, New York, where Joseph’s family would move in 1815. By the time Joseph had his first vision in 1820, as a boy of 14, Brigham was an established craftsman in Auburn, about 50 miles from Palmyra. And when the Book of Mormon was published and the Church organized in 1830, Brigham Young heard rumors of these events—and soon read the Book of Mormon—because he was by then supporting his family with a carpentry mill at Mendon, only 13 miles away.

The two latter-day prophets finally met in 1832, shortly after Brigham Young’s baptism. They were not separated again, except by Brigham’s journeys to preach the restored gospel, until the Prophet was martyred in 1844 and Brigham was called to take his place. But even then President Young continued to see himself as what he called “an Apostle of Joseph Smith,” a “witness” of his work, called to carry out the visions and plans of the great founding Prophet of the Restoration.1 He had come to know the Savior, had felt the Holy Spirit like fire in his bones, and had learned to be a prophet himself—in large part because of the way the Lord had been able to use Joseph Smith as a model and teacher. And he felt a deep and lasting emotional tie, was even visited on occasion by Joseph in his dreams. Finally, just before Brigham Young died, 100 years ago last August 29, after a painful illness that lasted five days, his daughter Zina reports that he was taken from his canopy bed and placed before an open window in the Beehive House where he could get better air: “He seemed to partially revive, and opening his eyes, he gazed upward, exclaiming: ‘Joseph! Joseph! Joseph!’ … This name was the last word he uttered.”2

About this Article

An article for a young Latter-day Saint audience about the personal relationship between Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. Originally published in The New Era (December 1977), 43–50.

Brigham Young, like many other early Mormons, traveled hundreds of miles to meet the man whose revelations had already profoundly changed his life. With his closest friend and fellow craftsman, Heber C. Kimball, he went from Mendon, New York, to Kirtland, Ohio, and found the Prophet felling trees and chopping wood behind his father’s home, where he was living: “Here my joy was full at the privilege of shaking the hand of the Prophet of God, and received the sure testimony, by the Spirit of prophecy, that he was all that any man could believe him to be, as a true prophet.”3 From that first handclasp Brigham began to be bound, heart, mind, and spirit to Joseph, whom he came to accept without reservation not only as the spokesman for God in his generation but as his own most powerful, personal model among men. In a letter to a non-Mormon friend he had known in Port Byron in the 1820s, he wrote, nearly ten years after Joseph Smith was killed:

In 1833 I moved to Ohio where I became acquainted with Joseph Jr. and remained familiarly acquainted with him in private councils and in his public work and acts until the day of his death, and I can truly say that I invariably found him to be all that any people could require a true prophet to be, and that a better man could not be. . . .4

The Prophet’s physical strength and vigor, his hearty frontier directness and good humor, and above all his penetrating prophetic gifts—all this appealed immediately to Brigham the carpenter. But the Prophet’s unique combination of strength and tenderness, of diverse physical, mental, and spiritual qualities, was new to many, including Brigham Young, and though he and others were deeply attracted, some only saw the human element. Brigham, too, was aware that Joseph was indeed human, a man he could therefore genuinely identify with and try to be like with some hope of success, but he also knew how the divine calling from God made the Prophet different:

Though I admitted in my feelings and knew all the time that Joseph was a human being and subject to err, still it was none of my business to look after his faults.

… I never had the feeling for one moment, to believe that any man or set of men or beings upon the face of the whole earth had anything to do with him, for he was superior to them all, and held keys of salvation over them. Had I not thoroughly understood this and believed it, I much doubt whether I should ever have embraced what is called “Mormonism.” …

It was not my prerogative to call him in question with regard to any act of his life. He was God’s servant, and not mine. … That was my faith, and it is my faith still.5

It was that faith, confirmed by the Holy Spirit, that Joseph Smith was a Prophet, chosen and directed by God, that allowed Brigham to stand as a rock of loyalty when tides of apostasy and persecution swirled around Joseph in Ohio and Missouri. It sustained him when he was suddenly left in charge of the desperate winter exodus, after the Prophet and most of the other leaders were imprisoned in Missouri. It enabled him to lead the great missionary journey of the apostles to England and to recognize and grow under the divine callings that increasingly came to him through Joseph until he received the Prophet’s mantle itself in August 1844. That faith became the knowledge that he himself was called of God and empowered Brigham Young, though perfectly conscious of his own human frailties, forcefully and confidently to lead the pioneers into a stark desert wilderness, to move them to great sacrifices in order to build there the kingdom of God, and from that base to take the gospel to all parts of the earth.

Brigham’s desire after meeting the Prophet was to be like him, and because of his loyalty and ability to learn from Joseph Smith, he did in fact become much like him. A major reason he succeeded was that he always remembered the source of Joseph’s greatness—the Prophet had accepted a call from the Savior to be His spokesman, and he taught and lived the truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In 1865 President Young said, “I honor and revere the name of Joseph Smith. I delight to hear it; I love it. I love his doctrine.”6 In 1843 he said to the Saints at Nauvoo:

Who is the author of this work and gathering? Joseph Smith, the Prophet, as an instrument in the hands of God, is the author of it. He is the greatest man on earth. No other man, at this age of the world, has power to assemble such a great people from all the nations of the earth, with all their varied dispositions, and so assimilate and cement them together that they become subject to rule and order. This the Prophet Joseph is doing. He has already gathered a great people who willingly subject themselves to his counsel, because they know it is righteous.7

Brigham Young began to develop rapidly toward his own foreordained role as a prophet the night in October 1832 when he first met Joseph and began to “subject [himself] to his counsel.” He and Heber C. Kimball were invited to stay for supper and for a regular, informal gathering of the Church leaders in Kirtland. There they “conversed together upon the things of the kingdom.” Brigham was asked to give the closing prayer, during which he was moved to speak in tongues. This was a spiritual gift the Prophet had not witnessed before; in fact, he had strongly warned against certain over-enthusiastic and unedifying cases of such expression at frontier camp meetings he had heard about, and the brethren thought he would condemn this manifestation. But when they asked him about it after Brigham left, he said, “No, it is of God, and the time will come when Brigham Young will preside over this Church.”8

This new convert, with little education and little experience at leading or teaching others, had much to learn. But he learned fast, in good part because of the witness he received of Joseph Smith’s calling and the loyalty which that inspired in him.

After spending most of the winter and spring on missionary journeys to Canada, “Elder Young,” as he was now often called, along with Heber C. Kimball, responded to the revelation the Prophet had received calling the Saints to gather at Kirtland. Apparently some of the others who gathered there had difficulty finding the right kind of employment or in getting paid on time, so, contrary to counsel, they went off to surrounding towns for the winter. But as Brigham later remembered, “I told them I had gathered to Kirtland because I was so directed by the Prophet of God, and I … was going to stay here and seek the things that pertained to the kingdom of God by listening to the teachings of his servants, and I should work for my brethren and trust in God and them that I would be paid.”9

Brigham Young not only managed to get along that winter in Kirtland with his carpentry, but he began to develop a close relationship with the Prophet. He learned from him in direct conversation and let his own spirit expand and his emotions mature and blossom under the influence of such a powerful model. He also impressed the Prophet and thus was asked to participate in the Zion’s Camp march to the aid of the Missouri Saints the next summer and performed that harrowing journey with exemplary loyalty to the Prophet’s leadership. The next year he was chosen by the Lord to be one of the first Quorum of Twelve Apostles.

As an apostle, Elder Young was to look back on Zion’s Camp as especially dear to him for the privilege it brought of being close to the Prophet and learning from him day by day. The young Church President’s organization of the camp on the same plan Moses had used—by tens, then fifties, and then hundreds—impressed Brigham as inspired of the Lord and powerfully effective, and he used the plan four years later when he was suddenly faced with evacuating 15,000 Saints from Missouri. He used it again when he organized the system for emigrating shiploads of Saints from Europe and again when he led the great exodus from Nauvoo. And all his life he fondly remembered Zion’s Camp and similar opportunities to learn from the Prophet that followed:

In the days of the Prophet Joseph, such moments were more precious to me than all the wealth of the world. No matter how great my poverty—if I had to borrow meal to feed my wife and children—I never let an opportunity pass of learning what the Prophet had to impart.10

Though often away on missions over the next few years, Elder Young had many opportunities for such learning. He learned directly through the revelations Joseph Smith constantly received and in the School of the Prophets—and more indirectly through such experiences as seeing the overwhelming spiritual outpourings when the Temple at Kirtland was dedicated in early 1836.

But by the next year the young apostle’s loyalty was tested. He told the Saints in 1857, “Once in my life I felt a want of confidence in brother Joseph Smith. … It was not concerning religious matters … but it was in relation to his financiering.”11 As part of the great national “Panic of 1837,” the Kirtland Anti-banking Society—in which many of the Church members had invested—failed, and Joseph was blamed. Many apostatized, and others wavered for a time; in fact, Joseph was later to lament that among the original Twelve, only Heber C. Kimball and Brigham Young did not ever “lift their heel against me.”12 The reason Brigham Young remained true, he later testified, was that after his momentary doubt, he immediately recognized his mistake:

A feeling came over me that Joseph was not right in his financial management, though I presume the feeling did not last 60 seconds, and perhaps not 30. It gave me sorrow of heart. … I repented of my unbelief, and that too, very suddenly, I repented about as quickly as I committed the error.13

As President Young later recorded: “During this siege of darkness, I stood close by Joseph, and with all the wisdom and power God bestowed upon me, put forth my utmost energies to sustain the servant of God and unite the Quorums of the Church.”14 At one time he offered to “cow-hide” a man who came into Kirtland and shouted through the streets in the middle of the night that Joseph had been “cut off” and he was to take the Prophet’s place. Once he learned of a plan to ambush and kill the Prophet who was returning from Michigan in a stagecoach, and he saved Joseph’s life by riding out to get him off the stage, substituting William Smith as a decoy while they escaped. At the height of the crisis, his vigorous defense of the Prophet succeeded in thwarting attempts to depose Joseph as President. In fact, because of this, Elder Young had to flee the city for his life in December even before the Prophet had to leave. Later he commented concerning this time, “When I saw a man stand in the path before the Prophet to dictate him, I felt like hurling him out of the way and branding him as a fool.”15

Brigham Young again and again demonstrated to the Prophet not only tenacious loyalty but the courage and competence and spiritual power to succeed in increasingly difficult crises and assignments—not only to succeed by some general human standard of success but to measure up to Joseph Smith’s prophetic vision: He got the Saints out of Missouri by putting the Church leaders, and then the people, under covenant that no one would go unless all, no matter how poor or weak, could go also and by returning many times himself to bring others out.16 He returned to Far West with the Twelve, in mortal danger after Governor Boggs’ “Extermination Order” had gone into effect, to fulfill to the letter Joseph’s earlier revelation requiring them to take leave from the Saints at the Temple site for their mission to England. And he led the apostles in England to a degree of success that fulfilled the Prophet’s high expectations.

The Church President was inspired in August 1841, after the Twelve returned from England, to give them new assignments—“the settling of the immigrants and the business of the Church at the stakes,” and the commission “to bear off the kingdom in all the world.” This accelerated the process that prepared Brigham Young to be Joseph Smith’s eventual successor and the Saints to accept him as such. That fall and the next year, the Prophet met more and more frequently with the Twelve in council and delegated to them an increasing amount of ecclesiastical and economic responsibility and power: calling them to help with the ingathering to Nauvoo and to assign and supervise missionaries; giving them authority to gather funds for the temple, etc., and to organize the 380 traveling elders sent to counter the attacks on the Prophet and the Church by apostates; and finally in 1844, asking them to organize and participate in his campaign for President of the United States, and thus to travel in the spring and summer of 1844 preaching both his political views and the restored gospel—which is why they were away from Nauvoo when he was killed on June 27.

Elder Young played a central role in this development of the Quorum, constantly increasing in wisdom and ability and in the Prophet’s confidence. By late 1841, Brigham, as head of the Quorum, became generally known as “President Young” and seems to have gradually become more close in counsel to the Prophet. He was the one to take the Church President’s place when he had to be in hiding and was in every practical sense the second in command. As early as the summer of 1842 there are entries in Brigham Young’s “Manuscript History” like the following:

June 9—Rode out with the Prophet, and looked at lands the Church had for disposal.

July 31—Attended council with the Prophet and others. In the month of July I attended councils, waited upon the immigrants; and as President Joseph Smith kept concealed from his enemies, I had continual calls from the brethren for counsel, which occupied much of my time.17

But the relationship was not merely ecclesiastical. When President Young returned from his ingathering mission in the fall of 1842, he was struck with a terrible illness that nearly killed him. The Prophet administered to him, prophesied that he would live, and then personally cared for him, sitting with him for hours, carefully instructing and supervising his attendants for many days during the crisis period. Brigham said much later concerning this time, “I used to think, while Joseph was living, that his life compared well with the history of the Savior.”18

One of the Savior’s central qualities that the Prophet taught Brigham Young was what the Lord had called, in an earlier revelation, “love unfeigned.” (D&C 121:41.) This kind of love is perhaps best revealed in those two prophets’ most unreserved expressions, their personal letters to their wives. Historian Richard Bushman has commented on Joseph Smith’s difference from other prominent public figures, “who become so absorbed in their public life that their private life is neglected.” Though the Prophet was deeply involved in “the good of the people, the fight against evil, etc. … he still drew back to his family and there obtained his deepest satisfactions.”19 Joseph’s tender letters from Liberty Jail to Emma, with stirring, unreserved messages of love to each child, show well the quality of soul that Brigham learned. Here is Brigham writing to his wife Mary Ann on June 12, 1844, when he was traveling to the East on his last mission:

My beloved wife, while I am waiting for a boat to go to Buffalo, I improve a few moments in writing to you. … This is a pleasant evening on the Lake but I feel lonesome; O that I had you with me this summer, I think I should be happy. Well, I am now because I am in my calling and doing my duty, but the older I grow the more I desire to stay at my own home instead of traveling. …

How I want to see you and [the children]. Kiss them for me and Luny [their youngest] twice or more. Tell her it is for me. Give my love to all the family. … I do feel to bless you in the name of the Lord.20

Only two weeks later, on June 27, the Prophet was killed. Brigham did not learn of Joseph’s death for three weeks, but he then remembered his experience on the day of the martyrdom while sitting in the depot in Boston, waiting for the train to Salem: “I felt a heavy depression of spirit, and so melancholy I could not converse with any degree of pleasure.”21 He had seen newspaper accounts of the assassination on July 9 but had discounted them because of the current sensationalism in the press about Mormonism. Then, on July 16, while in Petersboro, New Hampshire, with other apostles, he read a letter from Nauvoo that gave details of the murder of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. He roused himself from despair, decided on a course of action, and returned to Boston the next day to take the Twelve back to Nauvoo. But first, as Wilford Woodruff recounts:

Elder Brigham Young arrived in Boston this morning. I walked with him to 57 Temple Street and called upon Sister Vose. Brother Young took the bed and gave vent to his feelings in tears. I took the big chair, and veiled my face, and for the first time gave vent to my grief and mourning for the Prophet. …22

Nearly a month later, shortly after the great meeting where he and the rest of the Quorum of the Twelve were sustained to lead the Church, President Young wrote to his daughter back in Massachusetts:

It has been a time of mourning. The day that Joseph and Hyrum were brought in from Carthage to Nauvoo, it was judged by many, both in and out of the Church, that there were more than five barrels of tears shed. I cannot bear to think anything about it.23

But besides the ability to grieve deeply at this tragic personal loss, President Young had learned from the Prophet how to cope with new responsibilities and to move ahead with courage. He recovered quickly from the fear, felt by many of the Saints who were totally surprised by the death of the Prophet, that the Church’s religious authority had died with him:

The first thing which I thought of [when the letter was read] was, whether Joseph had taken the keys of the kingdom with him from the earth; brother Orson Pratt sat on my left; we were both leaning back on our chairs. Bringing my hand down on my knee, I said, the keys of the kingdom are right here with the Church.24

Although severely wounded with grief and beset with major problems that made the going anything but smooth, from that time President Young acted with inspired single-mindedness and effectiveness to shepherd the stunned Church and unite it under the authority of the Twelve, as he was certain Joseph had intended. He led the apostles back from the East on August 6, amid rumors that some of the mob were still lying in wait to kill them. They found that Sidney Rigdon, the only remaining official member of the First Presidency, had returned from Pittsburgh, where he had gone over a year before when a rift had developed between him and the Prophet. Now he was claiming the right to act as guardian of the Church for Joseph. The President of the Quorum acted swiftly to unify the leaders, and then the body of the Saints, against this and other claims that threatened the Church with disintegration. The next morning he met with all the apostles at the home of John Taylor, who was still recovering from terrible wounds received at the martyrdom, and then in the afternoon with all the Church leaders at the Seventies’ Hall, where he effectively rebutted Sidney Rigdon’s claims. With inspired assurance Elder Young moved to the next day a general meeting that had been called for a week later and there brought about an orderly and unifying succession of leadership. As he described it to his daughter in that letter of August already quoted:

The Brethren were overjoyed to see us come home, for they were little children without a father, and they felt so, you may be sure. All things are now reviving up again. The brethren prayed with all faith for us to return. … I have been in council almost all the time since I arrived here. But this much I can say, the spirit of Joseph is here, though we cannot enjoy their persons. Through the great anxiety of the Church there was a conference held last Thursday [August 8]. The power of the priesthood was explained and the order thereof, on which the whole Church lifted up their voices and hands for the Twelve to move forward and organize the Church and lead it as Joseph led it, which is our indispensable duty to do.

All things were, in fact, “reviving up again,” despite the unsettled conditions only a few days earlier, and the process was successful mainly because through the power of the Lord “the spirit of Joseph” did indeed manifest itself in remarkable, to many witnesses even miraculous, ways.

There is much evidence—from Brigham Young’s own account of the meeting, from the record of the speech he gave there, and from the accounts of others—that he spoke in a new voice that day, yet one that was familiar to those who knew Joseph Smith. In his own diary Brigham recorded:

This day is long to be remembered by me. … Now Joseph is gone, it seemed as though many wanted to draw off a party and be leaders. But this cannot be. The Church must be one or they are not the Lord’s; the saints looked as though they had lost a friend that was able and willing to counsel them in all things; in this time of sorrow … I arose and spoke to the people. My heart was swollen with compassion towards them and by the power of the Holy Ghost, even the spirit of the prophets, I was enabled to comfort the hearts of the Saints. … I laid before them the order of the Church and the power of the priesthood. After a long and laborious talk of about two hours in the open air with the wind blowing, the Church was of one heart and one mind. They wanted the Twelve to lead the Church as Br. Joseph had done in his day.25

The speech shows that Brigham Young indeed had the “spirit of the prophets,” that through the power of the Holy Ghost he spoke with a new sense of authority that both recalled to the people their lost Prophet and yet encouraged them to look forward to the great destiny of the Lord’s Church that had been restored:

Attention all! … For the first time in my life, for the first time in your lives, … without a prophet at our head, do I step forth to act in my calling in connection with the Quorum of the Twelve, as Apostles of Jesus Christ, … who are ordained and anointed to bear off the keys of the kingdom of God in all the world. …

You did not know who you had amongst you. … He loved you unto death—you did not know it until after his death; he has now sealed his testimony with his blood. There is much to be done. … as for myself I am determined to build up the kingdom of God. …

Brother Joseph the Prophet has laid the foundation for a great work and we will build upon it. … There is an almighty foundation laid, and we can build a kingdom such as there never was in the world.26

Wilford Woodruff recounted, long after, “Just as quick as Brigham Young rose in that assembly, his face was that of Joseph Smith— … the power of God that was upon Joseph Smith was upon him, he had the voice of Joseph.”27

This miraculous descent of the mantle of the Prophet upon Brigham Young was later recalled by many who were in the audience,28 but the crucial thing was that whatever they remembered of the miraculous was confirmed in the following months by the reality of President Young’s leadership as he did in very fact become a Joseph—a clearly inspired prophet—to his people. As William Burton wrote the next May: “But [Joseph’s and Hyrum’s] places were filled by others much better than I once supposed they could have been, the spirit of Joseph appeared to rest upon Brigham.”29

The spirit of Joseph—the prophetic voice and power from the Lord—continued with Brigham as he encouraged the Saints to complete the temple and develop the city, even in warning him against his natural tendency to push the people too hard. On August 17, 1845, he records: “This morning I dreamed I saw brother Joseph Smith and as I was going about my business he says, ‘Brother Brigham don’t be in a hurry’—this was repeated the second and third time, when it came in a degree of sharpness.”30 Another dream of Joseph, again carrying a plea responsive to the special needs of the time, came to Brigham over a year later in Winter Quarters, as he was preparing for the great trek west:

I dreamed that I saw Joseph sitting in a room in the South-West corner near a bright window and he sat in a chair with his feet both on the lower round. I took him by the hand and kissed him on both cheeks and wanted to know why we could not be together as we once were.

“He said that it was all right that we should not be together yet. We must be separated for a season. … Joseph said, do you be sure and tell the people one thing … that it is all important for them to keep the Spirit of the Lord, to keep the quiet Spirit of Jesus.31

As Nauvoo rapidly developed under the Apostle’s leadership into a lovely, progressive city, admired by gentile visitors during the period of peace following the martyrdom, President Young began to refer to it as the “City of Joseph.” But when he saw the resistance to renewed mob activity that began in September 1845 would lead only to continuing bloodshed, he set his face like flint to the West and the unfinished business of building the kingdom. He had caught the vision of the ensign to the nations, to be established in the tops of the mountains, from the Prophet himself. When the time came, he turned from Joseph’s city, where the Prophet was buried, from his own new home, even from the temple without reluctance, to begin the new task. His apprenticeship was over; he was now speaking under the Spirit’s direction, with his own prophetic voice such as in the Lord’s revelation to him concerning the trek west:

Let the companies be organized with captains of hundreds, captains of fifties, and captains of tens, with a president and his two counselors at their head, under the direction of the Twelve Apostles.

And this shall be our covenant—that we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord.

When the companies are organized let them go to with their might, to prepare for those who are to tarry.

Thou shalt be diligent in preserving what thou hast, that thou mayest be a wise steward; for it is the free gift of the Lord thy God, and thou art his steward.

If thou art merry, praise the Lord with singing, with music, with dancing, and with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving.

If thou art sorrowful, call on the Lord thy God with supplication, that your souls may be joyful.

Fear not thine enemies, for they are in mine hands and I will do my pleasure with them.

For they killed the prophets, and them that were sent unto them; and they have shed innocent blood, which crieth from the ground against them.

Therefore, marvel not at these things, for ye are not yet pure; ye can not yet bear my glory; but ye shall behold it if ye are faithful in keeping all my words that I have given you, from the days of Adam to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to Jesus and his apostles, and from Jesus and his apostles to Joseph Smith, whom I did call upon by mine angels, my ministering servants, and by mine own voice out of the heavens, to bring forth my work;

Which foundation he did lay, and was faithful; and I took him to myself.

Many have marveled because of his death; but it was needful that he should seal his testimony with his blood that he might be honored and the wicked might be condemned. (D&C 136:3–4, 6, 27–30, 36–39.)

Brigham Young never forgot from whom, by the grace of God, he had learned to speak and what the central message was. His words to the Saints in 1855 are good ones for us to consider on Joseph Smith’s birthday:

I feel like shouting Hallelujah all the time when I think that I ever knew Joseph Smith, the Prophet whom the Lord raised up and ordained, and to whom He gave keys and power to build up the Kingdom of God on earth and sustain it. These keys are committed to this people, and we have power to continue the work that Joseph commenced, until everything is prepared for the coming of the Son of Man. This is the business of the Latter-day Saints, and it is all the business that we have on hand.32

IT MIGHT HAVE been 1986, because Easter came in March and I was on my way to Montreal. But I went to see Dustin Hoffman in The Death of a Sales­man (bought a ticket at the last minute from a scalper), so it must have been two years earlier on my way to Boston. When I left the theater Wednesday afternoon, I walked east along Forty-second toward the small circulating library on Forty-first and Fifth Avenue, where I was to wait for Greg Reece, a young friend who had lived with us for awhile and now worked in New York. I grinned as I watched the confidence games being played by sidewalk hustlers — giant showy posters and pirated tapes for sale, and shell games of various kinds, especially the one using three cards on a cardboard tray held by a strap around the neck. I knew the games were basic small cons that worked on tourist gullibility and greed, and I went by without even stopping. But then I decided to get a snack, jaywalked to the Burger King for some french fries, and came out right onto a game in progress.

There were three black locals and the obvious mark — a white, thin-faced tourist. I watched, munching and smiling to myself, as the dealer placed three different cards on his tray, one the ten of clubs, then turned them over and shuffled them. The three others could place twenty dollars or more on the tray, then guess which card was the ten and turn it over. If they were right, the dealer matched what they had put down; if not, he took it. The other two locals — one an older man, with a startling band of pure white hair frizzed out between his black beret and his neck, and the other, perhaps twenty, in royal blue stretch pants — won occasionally, but the tourist kept missing, even though it seemed to me quite easy to follow the movement of the cards. In fact, every time he missed and wiped his hand nervously on his red tie I congratu­lated myself that I had guessed right.

As I became engrossed, the dealer began to ask me after each miss if I knew where the ten was, and I said “Sure” and pointed to it — correct every time. Slowly the bets got larger and the dealer, keeping up a constant patter about how easy it was (“See how often these guys win?”), began to chide the tourist for his misses (“See how this guy,” pointing to me, “does it.”). Finally, after the tourist missed on a sixty dollar bet, the dealer asked me to point out the ten without turning it over. “Just look under a corner and see if you’re right.” I said I was, and he said, “Show this guy. Put down sixty dollars, turn over the card again, and you can win.” I refused (“That wouldn’t be fair to you,” I said), so he had Black Beret do it and win sixty dollars. They all made fun of me, and some others now gathering around did, too.

I felt my heart going, pulsing in my head as the game continued, and then the same sequence developed again: a miss by Red Tie, constant patter, invitation to look (right again), then insistence by all that I turn up the card again and take the sure winner. I thought of the ticket I’d bought for Death of a Salesman, four times what I had ever paid for a play before, and I thought about other plays I wanted to see. I took out my wallet, looked down to count — $149 for all the rest of the trip — and watched myself put out the sixty dollars and turn over the card. Three of diamonds.

I was dazed. The game went on without a hitch — mostly wins by Black Beret and Stretch Pants, losses by Red Tie. The pace accelerated and the crowd was growing and talking, some commiserating with me. I tried to pull away. The patter motored on, and I knew the panic of loss, of betrayal, of desire. I wanted everything to stop. I wanted bitterly not to have lost, to be back at Burger King before all this, to have watched the cards more carefully. But I could still see, as a great calm in the frenzy of talk and shuffling, the cards — and how right I was each time. The patter focused more on me. “Turn it over. See, you’re right. Put your money on it. I owe you one, I’ll make it up to you, this time three for one.” Black Beret was helpful, like a kind uncle: “Do it,” he whispered. “He wants you to win it back — it’ll get the crowd with him.” The dealer’s eyes were enlarged, protruding, the mouth constant. I looked into my wallet and — with a lurch — put sixty dollars down and turned the card over. Six of hearts.

“No, look, it’s this one,” said Black Beret, sympathetically, turning over the ten. The crowd jammed in and swelled its noise. “That isn’t fair, you promised him.” “Mind your business,” snarled the dealer — then, with a quick glance toward Fifth Avenue, “Oh, oh, cops coming.” The crowd left, and the dealer, Black Beret, Stretch Pants, and Red Tie walked quickly together toward Broad­way, leaving me frozen, spent, swirling in a tempest, damned, gaping, clear only about one thing — I was the mark, the only mark.

As I stood there and then walked east I was absolutely serene and absolutely violated: calm, unsurprised to see no police descending on the illegal game, intensely aware of people, food carts, lights, dimming sky — but cordoned off, invisible. I walked down Fifth Avenueto the library and went up to the read­ing room and got out my paper for the Shakespeare meetings to go over until Greg came, but I could not see the words.

I watched a lady across the table in a print dress and imitation fur-collared coat that she kept partly buttoned. She had notebooks and folders full of bills and receipts and lists and slips that she kept shuffling and restacking and poring over and making new lists from. At first I thought she was balancing her checkbook, but she kept going over the same things, shifting in her chair, restacking the lists, sighing, copying new figures, pursing her lips, returning to the notebooks and then the slips of paper, erasing, writing, always intent, I couldn’t tell what she was doing. I had to stop watching.

_____

GREG AND I walked back along Forty-second, past Burger King to Broad­way, where we went underground and caught the B train local up to Seventy-ninth. Greg could see something was wrong but didn’t pry, just stopped sud­denly — twice — to look at me as we talked, once putting his hand on my shoulder. We got off and walked back to Seventh-sixth, where he had booked tickets for Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind at the Promenade. (But that was 1986, wasn’t it?) “I’m a little short on cash. Can I send you a check?” I asked, and he said sure and didn’t object when I suggested that, instead of going to dinner before the play, we walk down to Lincoln Center and see the Chagall windows in Avery Fisher Hall and grab a soft pretzel with mustard on the way (“My favorite tourist indulgence,” I said with just the right touch of self-mockery). My mind had come unfrozen enough to begin to calculate how I could make it home on my remaining twenty-nine dollars cash without getting any more money or admitting my plight — and in a way that would make me suffer (that seemed very important) : One dollar for the subway, one for the pretzel, another dollar fare to Greg’s apartment in Brooklyn after the play.

But what about getting to the airport? As we walked, Greg filled me in on his job with a new TV production company, but he could tell I was preoccu­pied. “How can I get to LaGuardia from your place by7:30in the morning?” I suddenly asked. (That must have been 1984). He stopped and looked at me, then went on. “Well, you can sleep in, have one of my great breakfasts, and take a taxi right up there, maybe twenty minutes,” he said. “Or you can get up at 5:00, leave me asleep, grab a piece of toast, and take the subway back in here and then out to the airport — give yourself two hours.” After a moment, seeing I was serious, he added, “The taxi is twenty dollars, the subway plus the bus from the nearest stop is two.”

Back at the theater, Greg told me we were in the old Manhattan Ward meetinghouse. He pointed to the unusual arched doorways and alcoves and blocked-in windows as we went through the foyer and up the stairs into the main theater. When my eyes adjusted I could see the huge encompassing arches on four sides that had framed the original chapel and supported the dome above. The space was now filled on three sides with banks of seats, with a wide stage on the fourth side and a catwalk above. In the program I read, “First constructed in 1928 as a Mormon Church, the building was refurbished and officially opened as the Promenade Theatre in 1969. . . .New York’s only Off-Broadway theatre on Broadway.”

Shepard’s play, one of his earliest, is a preparation for the more well-known Fool for Love; both plays chart the agony of Western misfits, grotesque and universal in their irrational revenges and bizarre, literally or spiritually in­cestuous, loves. Greg doesn’t like Shepard’s work and had gotten the tickets after my phone call only out of kindness, but I find Shepard the most attractive as well as troubling new American dramatist. He is willing to use the bleak lives and dry landscapes and tacky motels and vicious words that are one part of a section of America usually neglected in drama, the twentieth century West I grew up in. And he does not merely imitate those lives but invests them believably with the great human themes of love and death and with passages of poetry and even occasional, quite “unrealistic” but believable epiphanies. For instance, at the end of this play, Jake, who has nearly killed and then deserted his wife in one of his recurrent fits of jealousy, returns to tell her that her reality, the truth of her generous, ingenuous being that has so infuriated him, is also what makes all other ideas and presences unreal, merely a lie of his mind. In an act of amazing mercy that her unique reality has taught him and finally made possible for him to do, he gives his life to preserve her — and in doing so finally changes himself.

_____

IT HURTS VERY much to think of you. How could you suffer not only our pains but our sicknesses and infirmities? Did you actually become sick and infirm or merely feel, with your greater imagination, something like what we feel when we are sick and infirm? But could you actually “know according to the flesh,” as you say, if you didn’t literally experience everything with your body? And if you did literally experience our infirmities, did you know our greatest one, sin? Everyone says you didn’t sin, that you were always perfect. But how then could you learn how to help us? And yet if you did sin, if you actually became sick and infirm and unwilling, for a moment, to do what you knew was right, how does that help us? I don’t want you to hurt like this, like I do now, to be ashamed, to hate the detailed, quotidian past. Yet I want you to know the worst of me, the worst of me possible, and still love me, still accept me — like a lovely, terrible drill, tearing me all the way down inside the root, until all the decay and then all the pulp and nerve and all the pain are gone.

Can’t you tell us directly, without all the mystery and contradiction, if what I feel is right? Could it be that your very willingness to know the actual pain and confusion and despair of sin, to join with us fully, is what saves us? It’s true, I feel your condescension in that; I feel you coming down from your formidable, separate height as my Judge and Conscience. I feel you next to me as my friend. Did it happen in Gethsemane, when you turned away from your father and your mission for just a moment? I think so. So how can I refuse to accept myself, refuse to be whole again, if you, though my Judge whom I hide from, know exactly what I feel and still accept me? Yet it hurts so much to hear you tell of your pain to Joseph Smith, when you remember that moment in the Garden. You say, “Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit -— and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink — Nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men.”

Was that preparation so painful, even when you recalled it as the resur­rected Lord — and so many hundred years later — that you still shrank and could not complete your sentence? Is that pause between “shrink” and “never­theless” the actual moment of your Atonement? And why did you also tell Joseph that you will be red in your apparel when you come, in garments like one that treadeth in the winevat? Why will you have to say then, “I have trodden the winepress alone, and have brought judgment upon all people; and none were with me.”

Who is it can withstand your love?

_____

IT COST ME five dollars from Dorval Airport to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal, but I had paid for the room in advance and could fast for a few days. The other participants in my seminar Thursday afternoon seemed to like my paper on “Shakespeare as a Healer,” though they were more interested in his possible knowledge and use of Renaissance psychological therapy than in my evidence for his preoccupation with Christian ideas about healing the soul. It was just as well. I was feeling very much a hypocrite, a talker, an absurd posturer who knew to do good and did it not. What did I really know about healing?

The next day I slipped out between sessions to visit the Montreal Fine Arts Museum, just up Rue Sherbrooke from the hotel, but found it closed. It was Good Friday in heavily Catholic French Canada. Walking back I heard singing from a small stone Protestant church. A constantly smiling, bustling, very delicate black woman found me a seat and gave me a program and hymnal (I watched her a moment, noticing her color and her soft, scurrying solicitude; New York had seemed all black, the Shakespeare Association meetings lily-white). The choir finished singing a Monteverdi motet, and a lay reader, a tall blonde woman with a black surplice hanging loosely over her bright orange dress, gave the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 53, the “suffering servant” passage: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him. … by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. … he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors.” Then we sang Bach’s Chorale from the St. Matthew Passion:

O sacred head, sore wounded,
With grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded
With thorns, Thine only crown. .. .
What Thou, my Lord, has suffered
Was all for sinners’ gain:
Mine, mine was the transgression,
But thine the deadly pain.

Back at the hotel I asked about other Good Friday observances. Were any scheduled at Notre-Dame, the large cathedral-like church I had seen while walking through the Old City by the St. Lawrence River the night before? The concierge was uncertain but thought there would be something at3:00 p.m., the traditional hour of Christ’s death. He confirmed by calling the church for me. Since I had to walk, I left right after the general session that ended at2:00and hurried east along Rue Sherbrooke to Rue Universite and then south to Notre-Dame, which in daylight seemed built somewhat like the two-towered Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Only two blocks away I found police cars setting up barriers for a crowd of several thousand people just coming along Rue Ste. Catherine from the east and turning down Rue Uni­versite” to the church. I joined them and found an English-speaking participant who explained they had made a twelve-milemarch beginning that morning, an annual pilgrimage complete with “stations of the cross” as the stopping places. A truck with large loudspeakers was leading, and a man in the front seat continuously sang religious songs for themarchers. They were of all ages and dress: priests, nuns, groups of children, solitary housewives, blue-collar men, young couples, many with wooden crosses hung around their necks, some in groups carrying full-size crosses, a few with banners: “Vendredi Saint,” “Jesus, Notre Sauveur,” etc. They were welcomed at the Cathedral by a brass band and a large crowd; then all of us pushed in to fill the huge main floor and the two galleries.

As we waited I walked the full circuit of aisles, trying to respond, as I had in the cathedrals in Europe, to the builders’ sense of space and light. The stained glass in this church is too realistic and sentimental for my taste, but the sanctuary, with its high altar, is gorgeous: rich in light, simply proportioned but with much sculpture, which is focused in a huge figure of the risen Christ, seated in glory above a figure of the crucified Christ. The artworks and small chapels on the perimeters are ordinary, except for a striking painting of an early French nun earnestly teaching Indian children, the children’s faces angled in what seems accusing innocence toward the viewer. I thought of Tucker-man’s chilling line, “They have their tears, nor turn to us their eyes.”

A white-robed priest began to address the congregation about2:30and continued for twenty minutes. My French was only good enough to get the general drift: an informal homily on the sins of the day. I moved up the left outside aisle and slipped into a marble corner at the side of the stairs from the nave up to the sanctuary, where I could watch both the priest and the audience. He was obviously very popular, occasionally joking, using the device — which seemed to work well — of repeating a rhetorical question, “And have we sinned?” followed by an example or two and then the question again. Occasionally his exhortations led him to mention a hymn, which he would then start singing, and the congregation would join in. Finally an usher spotted me and sent me to find a seat; but by this time there weren’t any, so I stood at the back. The priest, now far away from me, mentioned Mary and then began singing “Ave Maria.” I heard a trumpet behind me softly join in and turned to see a black teenager, who reminded me of Stretch Pants, slowly move forward through the main doorway, playing the melody. Then, as the singing ended, he continued playing solo, slowly moving back. His mother was stand­ing in an alcove, watching, and after he finished, she moved to stand by him, her hand on his arm.

At2:50 the priest quickly finished his talk and a complete silence fell over the congregation until2:55, when a group of priests, white-robed and hooded, evidently representing all of us, filed up to the altar and gazed up at the cruci­fied Savior until3:00. The signal of the moment of death was a sudden light­ing of the brightest altar lights; all the congregation stood and remained in silence for a few minutes. Then slowly we left.

_____

IN THE MID-SEVENTIES I sometimes went fishing at North Eden. That tiny delta and valley, opening into the east side of Bear Lake in northernUtah, was homesteaded, along with a similar, smaller valley, South Eden, late in the nine­teenth century. Two small reservoirs were built in North Eden to hold water through the summer for irrigating hayfields and perhaps a few gardens. Some­one planted the reservoirs with rainbow and brook trout, which grew, as did the native cutthroat, into huge fish in those isolated, food-rich lakes: the cut­throats lean, fierce fighters; the rainbows and brookies jeweled and heavy-sided. One of my father’s complicated business transactions had left him with a partial interest in the one remaining ranch and a key to the gate at the valley’s west end that kept most people away from the reservoirs.

On a mid-August morning before sunup, one of Dad’s clients, who insisted on taking his Jeep Wagoneer, drove us east from Salt Lake City to Evanston and then north along the Utah-Wyoming border through Woodruff and Randolph, down the long incline to Laketown on the south shore of Bear Lake, then up the east side.

I was alone in the back seat, only half-listening to my father’s usual cheery commentary and storytelling. My own thoughts were dull, almost despondent: I had been released from St. Olaf College the year before in what looked to me (and some colleagues) like a decision to eliminate my influence on students, one of whom had joined the Mormon Church. Then I had been turned down for a position at BYU, apparently because of concern about what parents might think about how a person of my unorthodox views and background might influence students. At the same time, I was turned down at the University of Utah, because, as one of my former teachers there confided with regret, “This department simply won’t hire an active, believing Mormon.” (Which was I, too devoted a Mormon — or not devoted enough? Where was my home, my vocation? In Zion or in exile?)

We had moved to Utah and were subsisting on part-time institute teaching for the Church in Ogden and Salt Lake and a writing fellowship in Leonard Arlington’s Church History Division — and a large garden at our home in Kaysville. And I had begun to lose confidence. Perhaps I didn’t have a job simply because I wasn’t good enough, didn’t have enough scholarship published or good enough teaching evaluations to overcome those other qualms adminis­trators were having (after all, I hadn’t been accepted at the other places to which I had applied either). I had felt the mantle leave me when I was released as branch president in Minnesota, and no spiritual security had re­placed it. I found it hard to pray, to remember what it had felt like to bless my branch members and family with complete assurance and to know with certainty the Spirit’s response. I wondered constantly, in blank repetition through broken sleep as we drove, if I had lost my way, if the Lord knew there was such a person anymore. I wondered where the deepest part of me had gone.

We had our boat in the higher lake by 7:00 a.m.and headed for the upper end, where the fishing just out from the stream mouth had been best in late summer. I sat in the prow facing the early sun and the sharp canyon wind, smelling the water and observing the long scar the mule-pulled Fresno scrapers had made long ago as they brought down fill for the dam. Suddenly I saw to my right a V in the water, much like our boat’s wake but very small, moving rapidly across to the shore on our left. I silently pointed and Dad slowed so that we intercepted the double riffle, just behind a four-foot rattlesnake, moving with the same motion it makes on open sand, its yellow on black diamonds and beige rattles and thick body clearly visible under our prow. None of us spoke.

Using wet flies cast with a bubble, we each took our limit of three trout over five pounds and, acknowledging the mutual agreement of those fishing on this private lake, put the many others we caught back. Two that my father caught with his own self-designed version of a double woolly worm that ended in a red tuft must have weighed over eight pounds.

We tried some dry fly casting in the early afternoon, and I watched a huge brookie rise to take my dragonfly and then, coming in, suddenly turn uncon­trollably under the anchor rope and snap the delicate leader, close enough that I could see the rich scattering of blue and red-gold aureoles down its side. I felt it go, with no regret. By4:00 the wind up the canyon off Bear Lake was too strong for good fishing, and we left. Dad and I both offered to drive, but the client, who had taken a nap, insisted he wasn’t tired and for variety headed around the lake to Garden City and down Logan Canyon, with me sleeping across the back seat and Dad dozing in the front.

_____

WHEN I CAME up out of unconsciousness I had my hands on my father’s head and could feel his hair and blood. I couldn’t hear the words I was say­ing, but I felt them from the blessing part of me, the deepest part, before consciousness. Dad was more conscious than I was but more hurt. I gradually began to see the ground, the fir trees, then the cars just down from us. There was a blue Austin impaled at a slight angle onto the front of the Jeep. All of the Jeep’s doors were sprung open, and the freezer of huge fish was splashed across the highway. I kept my hands on Dad’s head and began to hear his moaning, then felt pain emerging in my own chest and struggled to breathe.

Police came over soon and told me our driver had fallen asleep and run head-on into the Austin, which had been driven by a German tourist whose legs had been broken. Ambulances were on the way. Each new face asked me where we caught the fish. Our driver, who wasn’t hurt at all, kept apologizing, frantically. He knew my father was dying. When the ambulances came, they put Dad in the first one and tried to get me to lie down by him, but that made it even harder for me to breathe. At the Logan hospital they made me lie down for x-rays of my broken ribs, and I nearly fainted. Then the technician told me they had seen what looked like a bruise on the upper aorta in my father’s x-rays and were going to rush him to Salt Lake because the artery could burst at any moment.

I asked the technician if he would help me give my father a blessing, and he nodded and went for some consecrated oil. We found Dad on a gurney in the next room, barely conscious, the whole left side of his face, where he had struck the dashboard, going purple. I blessed him with life, specifically with the five years he had told me that spring he needed in order to complete the arrangements to consolidate our family investments and transfer them into the Church’s missionary funds. The words were given to my tongue, beyond my mind. I called Charlotte and Mom and told them we’d had a slight accident, to call Dad’s friend, heart surgeon Russell Nelson, and to meet us at the LDS Hospital.

But all confidence left me on the ninety-minute, blaring-sirens ambulance ride to Salt Lake. I sat in the front seat, Dad and a doctor and nurse just behind me through a curtain. As the driver radioed ahead, asking Dr. Nelson to be ready and describing the emergency, I was constantly sure someone would soon push through the curtain to tell me the aorta had burst and my father was dead. When we arrived, Dad was rushed into surgery and Charlotte stayed with me while I got us checked in and walked to my own room. Then I couldn’t breathe again. Charlotte got them to look at my x-rays, which I was carrying; they decided that my collapsed lung needed immediate attention and sent Charlotte out while an intern gave me a local, made an incision, and pushed a hollow needle between my ribs and began to evacuate the chest cavity so my lung would reinflate.

Charlotte came back to tell me my father was fine — except for some missing teeth and a broken jaw. The new x-rays they took for Dr. Nelson showed no bruise on the aorta. I thought of the fish, the brookie, and the part of me that moved to heal my father before I knew anything. We were alive.

_____

I MADE IT back to Manhattan (another seven dollars, leaving me twelve dollars) in time to meet Greg for the matinee of Hamlet at the Joseph Papp Shakespeare Festival Theater near Astor Place. “Put both these tickets on the tab for that check I’m sending you,” I said when he came up. “I owe you for the toast.” I was anxious to see what Liviu Ciulei, the great Hungarian director who is now in charge of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, would do with this difficult and (in my opinion) usually butchered play and to see the popular movie actor, Kevin Kline, do the lead. (This was certainly 1986.) I was dis­appointed in both of them: more of the same traditional misreading of the play as simply a struggle by a romantic intellectual to get enough courage to take bloody revenge on the uncle who killed his father.

Ciulei’s best decision was to let the costuming and instincts of the actors follow Shakespeare’s words and show Hamlet becoming more and more like his monstrous uncle as he succumbs to the revenge spirit. The poison that symbolizes that spirit is initially dropped by the uncle into Hamlet’s father’s ear, then, in the call to revenge, is dropped into Hamlet’s ear by the father’s ghost and, in direct response to Hamlet’s threats, into Laertes’ ear by Claudius. By the play’s end that poison is spreading to corrupt and finally kill them all. Ciulei also allowed Harriet Harris to play Ophelia in a way that let the words speak true, even against the rest of his direction. She was able to show a woman and her innocent love being ground to pieces between the sinful male “honor” of Hamlet and the sinful male “protection” of her father.

After the play we walked up past Christopher Park and found, at the corner of West Fourth Street, a quartet of young men, two on violin, one on viola, and one on cello, just beginning Haydn’s “Sunrise Sonata.” They were about the same age as Stretch Pants and the trumpet player in Montreal but were dressed in levis and T-shirts, like the dealer. They were excellent musi­cians, and most of the rowdy crowd stood quietly or passed by carefully. Nearly everyone put a quarter or two into the open case, but I waited, thought, felt within me the war of blame for the con game — and guilt and racism — against all my opposing beliefs, and furtively put in five dollars. As we caught a bus up Seventh Avenue, I told Greg I thought I’d get some rest before Easter, left him at his station on Forty-second, and transferred across and up Madison to the empty apartment on Sixty-third that Dave and Karen Davidson had lent me for the weekend. I bought bread at the corner deli and explored the re­frigerator — but still felt I shouldn’t eat and slept uneasily.

_____

THIS IS MY report. I have been assigned to George England, one of my descendants, for thirty years now. He carries my own name but does not use George often, though that is his first name. I have protected him well, but I do not understand him. I think I should remain on this assignment for at least one more ten-year term.

The main problem is that George understands what is right to do but does not do it. He knows more about the Atonement than I did when I was branch president in Lyme Regis — or even when I became a patriarch in Plain Cityafter the crossing toUtah. He writes constantly about it, even when he is writ­ing for the gentiles about literature. Many people praise him for what he says; they write letters to him telling how he helped them live the gospel better and helped them understand repentance. But he still does terrible things. It is still hard for him to be honest. He covers up his mistakes with lies. He pretends he knows things or remembers people or has read books when he has not. I think he loves to do right, but he has a hard time being honest or kind when the chance to do so is sudden or embarrassing or when he is in pain or lonely. If he has time to think, he is very often good, but not when he is surprised.

When I helped him marry Charlotte Ann, you know how much better he was for awhile. He began to learn from her to be generous before he thought about it. He even began to be honest like she is, without toting up the cost. But after all that self-pity when he lost his job at St. Olaf ten years ago he began to be a hustler, to cut corners, to take advantage. I was able to use that car accident to help him know he was good. And when you arranged for him to be a bishop, that was fine for awhile. But he seems to have lost contact with Charlotte Ann. He isn’t listening to her very well, and he isn’t telling her what he really feels. I think she is getting tired.

Perhaps he is writing too much. I am certain he is not praying enough. He is worried, though, and wondering, sometimes frantically, I think, why there is not someone to help him the way he has helped some who have needed him. He does not seem to be able to ask for help. Perhaps something will happen that we can use. I hope so. My heart reaches out to complete the circle. I think some good chances will come now that he is in a bishopric again and working with the primary and the Cub Scouts — and also when he becomes a grandfather in two years.

I am sorry about the language of this report. I know you want me to learn from him, but it is hard when he talks so very little. Please excuse all mistakes.

_____

I COULDN’T SLEEP and then overslept, so I had to run all the way up through the Easter-dressed people on Fifth Avenue to make it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Eighty-first by the 10:30 opening. I paid one dollar of the four-dollar suggested contribution (leaving me one last bus fare plus just enough to get to the airport the next morning). I went right to the Rembrandts and Vermeers, but even there I found I could only focus well on two paintings: Rembrandt’s gentle “Christ with a Pilgrim’s Staff” and Vermeer’s quiet, con­suming “Woman with a Blue Pitcher,” the young housewife working calmly in that corner of a room that Vermeer painted again and again, as if he might understand the whole world through one place seen completely. Then I hur­ried down the long hall, past the antique pianofortes, to the south wing — Manet’s white apparition, “Woman with a Bonnet,” framed in the doorway as a beacon visible all the way. But I turned quickly to find my favorite Manet at the far right: “The Dead Christ with Angels.”

Critics of the nineteenth-century French Academy did not like the extreme realism, the precisely bird-like blue wings on the two angels and the heavy, black-shadowed cadaver. But I find the moment captured by Manet extremely moving. It is not the traditional moment of shining glory after life returns. It is the dark time of struggle as Christ’s divine spirit is still creating the resurrection from within his still-dead mortal body, with the angels still sorrowing, holding him up, urging life to return. I agree with Emile Zola, the French novelist, who wrote of Manet’s “obstinate eye and audacious hand,” his ability to imagine and realize such angels, “those children with great blue wings who are so strangely elegant and gentle.” These are the angels Mary Magdalene saw later, when she found the tomb empty, the two still “sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain” (John20:12). At the front of the painting is a snake, the one from Eden, its head about to be crushed according to the promise.

I took the bus across Central Park to the chapel on the second floor of the Church-owned office building on Sixty-fifth and Broadway so I could make sacrament meeting at noon. After the sacrament was administered, a short Easter musical program preceded the regular testimony bearing. But if this was 1986 then it was on the last Sunday of March, rather than the first Sun­day, when Mormons normally fast for twenty-four hours and bear testimony. And the printed program I saved proves that it was indeed Easter. Anyway, after the choir’s “Easter Hymn” and a woman’s quartet singing “The Lord’s Prayer,” the choir leader (Andrea Thornock, I see from the program) sang “He Was Despised” from The Messiah. She had dark hair and wore a long surplice-like overdress. It was made of what looked like velvet and was dyed a striking grape red. Her somber alto voice reminded us of the costs of salva­tion : “He was despised, rejected, a man of sorrows” — her voice pronounced exactly the grief in that three-note dying fall on “sorrow” that must have come from Handel’s own pain. She looked straight into our eyes, as she slowly turned and looked across the congregation: “He hid not his face from shame, from shame and spitting.”

Then Liz Hodgin, in a lovely floral print and pink hat, sang the soprano solo that has been called by Kenneth Clark and others the greatest piece of human music: “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.” But it is that, I be­lieve, only when it is sung by someone, like Liz, who believes, who sings her own testimony as well as Handel’s. And our hearts were lifted from the depths Andrea had properly taken us down to. I blessed Andrea for planning such a program and for being part of it, for remembering, though we Mormons don’t often notice Good Friday, what that somber day is meant to recall: that Christ was suffering servant as well as glorious victor, that, like all of us sinners, he had to die before he could be resurrected.

The bishop bore his testimony, not about the resurrection but about the power of repentance, which he had experienced personally. An elegantly dressed businessman picked up the theme by confessing, in a careful, broken voice, how Christ had changed him twenty years before, suddenly, completely. A short man with a beer belly, thinning, long black hair, and a black leather jacket, almost a caricature of the aged hippie, spoke softly of his long, slow, still-backsliding conversion. And a young Puerto Rican on the bench in front of me, whom I had noticed struggling for courage to get up, spoke last. He told how a few weeks before he had made a Saturday trip to see this strange part of New York, had wandered into the LDS visitors’ center on the main floor just below us, and had met some missionaries and joined the Church. He tried to describe his former sins and how he had changed. “I’m sorry in all the world,” he kept saying. “I’m sorry in all the world.”

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither.
June 1982

I grew up in a safe valley. The years five through twelve, when we are most sensuously attached to the landscape and when, I think, the foundations of identity are firmly laid, I lived in gardens and wheatfields. They had been claimed a generation before from desert knolls and sagebrush flats but were now constantly fruitful, watered by canals or sufficient rain for dryland grains and surrounded by low mountains that were protective, inviting, never fearful. We hiked into the mountains for deer and trout to supplement our meat, eaten sparingly from the pigs butchered each fall, or sometimes we rode out to look for horses that had strayed and, once a year, on the Sabbath nearest the 24th of July, with all the Sunday School, we went in cars to have classes out of doors and eat a picnic together and explore those safe canyons of Cherry Creek or Nine Mile that brought us our water.

Even when I found a perfect flint arrowhead and a large flawed spearhead on one of those picnics, I did not imagine the blood. Instead I thought about coming there to live in a rock cave I had found high in the canyon — perhaps with Dee Christiansen, my companion in Saturday-long Tarzan adventures, perhaps with Margene Ware, my first serious love (moral and practical details absolutely did not intrude into such fantasies).

I wanted safe and secret places even within that safe valley. And I found or made them. The canal was one. It moved slowly along the east side of the valley, no more than two feet deep except at “The Diversion,” where a falls as the canal divided created a spice of danger. Submerged in the rich muddy water with a straw for air or lying on the farm road bridge while it seemed to move backward over the surface flowing just a few feet below, my mind would flow to a safe world inside me.

There was the vacant lot across from Grandma Hartvigsen’s that grew pepper weeds three feet high, dense and fragrant, perfect for making trails and hidden nests. The cottonwood that stood right at the corner of Grandpa’s barn and could be reached from the roof had a large cup where the first branches separated. And there was a little grove of fruit trees, part of the old homestead out on what we still called the Coffin place. My father relentlessly consoli­dated those early 160-acre holdings, each with log cabin, a well, outbuildings, and trees, into large, uninterrupted fields to fit the economies of the shift from horses to tractors. This grove was not leveled partly because it was watered, along with a lovely line of cottonwoods, by overflow from the town reservoir, built on our northern boundary to hold the stream from Nine Mile. Dad kept Peter Coffin’s old house and barn to store machinery in and we always parked the truck there and ate our lunch in those trees on that fresh, grassy bank, adding watercress from the little overflow stream and sometimes plums or apples from the neglected grove.

The subtlest bliss from such safe and cozy places came each spring. It was a bliss mostly of the mind because I could only be in such a place occasionally and briefly — but my heart yearned, on early May mornings, when the brisk Southern Idaho wind still moved the tops of sagebrush along our fencelines and I could look down as we passed in the truck and see, among the clumps of sage, small patches of last year’s dead grasses with just a scatter of new blades and a few small flowers coming through. I knew those places were warm and fragrant, humming with tentative insect life.

When I would sometimes, on a Saturday, walk out to the “ranch” (as we called it, though any livestock that might justify that name were gone), carry­ing an extra dessert for Dad’s lunch or a hoe to work at the potato patch we planted during the war by a spring in the lower 320, I could sometimes stop and hide for a time under the sagebrush out of the wind. I could crush the small gray-green, velvet leaves from the strangely dead-looking branches until the air was sharp with sage or hold my fingers close until the smell went back into my throat. There would be one or two mild yellow buttercups, with five waxed petals, concavely shaped as if still ready to close quickly around the orange center. And by late May a few wild honeysuckles, the blossoms washed pink and detachable, made to be plucked off delicately and delicately set be­tween the lips so the tube under the blossom could be sucked for the smallest, most delicate taste, deep on the tongue.

But most of all I was drawn to secret places I made, like the huge lilac clump at Dee’s grandmother’s, where we had cut out the inner branches for our hiding place and could strip to our shorts, creep out and run wild across the lawn and garden, through the barns, and even sneak into her cellar for a can of tuna fish and retreat through branches to lie still as she walked by, calling Dee. Or the places I fashioned at the back of our woodpile where I could be completely hidden and watch crazy old Brother Nelson do his chores, mumbling passages of scripture to himself, and where I hid the revolver a friend, who had stolen it from home, gave me to keep. I would nestle in among the logs and boards, hold the gun in both hands and think about using it to kill deer when I took my mate off to Cherry Creek. One day it was gone.

Our valley began just outside the rim of the Great Basin, at the point we called Red Rock, where the waters of ancient Lake Bonneville had once worn through the Nugget sandstone formation and drained out into what became the Portneuf and Snake rivers, leaving a mile-wide scar and finally a slough moving slowly through cattailed bottom lands that gave us our name, Marsh Valley. The slough provided poor fishing — mostly chubs and suckers — but attracted great flights of geese in the fall that swept up to our stubble fields to feed at night and moved to the north in huge, constantly reforming wedges. I may have sensed from them that our valley was part of something larger, but surely I knew so when my parents suddenly went off forty miles to Pocatello late one night in Grandpa’s new hump-backed Mercury, leaving me in Grandma’s care, and came back after a week with my baby sister. Or when I sat in Grandpa’s lap, playing with his gold watch chain and listening to the strange, emphatic voices emerging from the static of his Philco. Prophets, I was told, at general conference inSalt Lake City. But even the Second World War seemed far away, unconnected, intruding only for moments when I rushed outside at a sudden roar one overcast morning to see a strange, double-bodied, P-38 fighter plane just passing over our house, hedgehopping down the valley toward Pocatello under the low clouds. Or when the oldest Bick-more boy was shot through the chest by a sniper onOkinawaand came home to tell about it in Sacrament Meeting.

Hamlet to his friend:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come —

My father knew of larger things than our valley, and he included me easily. He had left home at seventeen, learned to paint the fine interiors of Union Pacific passenger cars, and lived alone, rising early to read the Book of Mormon and The Discourses of Brigham Young. When he spoke of Nephi andAlma andMoroni or of Joseph and Brigham and Heber I felt his love for me. When he said Christ had appeared to him in a dream and told him the Book of Mormon was true, I knew it had happened. And as I rode with him to do his share on the Church’s welfare farm or to the store or the wheat ele­vator or the machinery shop or from neighbor to neighbor, to borrow and return, to ask for help and give, to buy and sell, I saw him doing the truth and felt safe.

One June dawn we drove toward the reservoir farm for a day of weeding the fallow ground. He would drive the tractor. I was old enough to ride the twenty-four-foot rod weeders, jumping off to tromp away stubble as it accumu­lated around the goosenecks and rods. That morning, as he often did, he stopped the truck and took me to see how the wheat was heading out in that lower 320. We kept our feet between the rows as we walked out on a ridge, I just learning how to imitate his motion of plucking a stalk to examine critically its forming kernels. He asked me to kneel with him, and he spoke, I thought to Christ, about the wheat. He pledged again, as I had heard him at home, to give all the crop, all beyond our bare needs, to build the kingdom, and he claimed protection from drought and hail and wind. I felt, beside and in me, something, a person, it seemed, something more real than the wheat or the ridge or the sun, something warm like the sun but warm inside my head and chest and bones, someone like us but strange, thrilling, fearful but safe.

How is it then that sometime in those years I first felt my own deepest, most hopeless, fear, the fear of being itself? It is a fear I have never been able to write about until now nor imagined anyone else knew about or could under­stand, a fear so fundamental and overwhelming that I feel I must literally shake myself from it when it comes or go mad. And yet I felt it as a child in that safe valley. I’ve forgotten, perhaps blocked away, the time it first came. Probably it was during one of those long summer evenings when Bert Wilson and I would sleep out on our large open front lawn and watch the stars come. The stars in that unpolluted sky were warm and close and dense and, as I began to learn from my father, who taught early morning seminary, about the worlds without number God had created and that we had always existed and always would, destined to explore and create forever in that infinite universe, it was exciting, deeply moving at times, to look into those friendly fires that formed patterns in the night and stretched away beyond my comprehension.

But one evening there began to come moments when I could feel moving into my mind, like a physical presence, the conviction that all was quite absurd. It made no sense at all that anything should exist. Something like nausea, but deeper and frightening, would grow in my stomach and chest but also at the core of my spirit, progressing like vertigo until in desperation I must jump up or talk suddenly of trivial things to break the spell and regain balance. And since that time I am always aware that that feeling, that extreme awareness of the better claim of nothingness, lies just beyond the barriers of my busy mind and will intrude when I let it.

Much later, of course, I learned about existential anxiety and the Christian sense of total dependence, of contingency, and I heard about the question Paul Tillich’s daughter asked him, “Why is there something and not nothing?” But I believe these are quite different things from what I feel. My own deep fear seems unique, precisely because of those unique Mormon beliefs that have given me my greatest joy and security. It is one thing to wonder, as traditional Christians do, why an absolute, perfectly self-sufficient God would bother to create me and this strange, painful universe out of nothing, to feel the proximate mysteries of this “vale of tears” but also an utter dependence on an ulti­mate being who can indeed reduce me and the universe to nothingness and thus painlessness again — or to feel Albert Camus’s desperate bitterness about a universe that has produced beings like us, with our constant yearning for meaning and permanence, but which seems to answer with absurdity and annihilation.

My own experience with God and this universe has produced not only dependence but identity. I have felt confirmed in my own separate, necessary, and unquenchable being. I had no beginning, not even in God. And the re­stored gospel provides the best answers — the most adventuresome and joy­ful — to the basic questions about how I came to be here and about my present and future possibilities. But there finally is no answer to the question of why and how I exist in my essential being. I just always have, and that is where my mind balks in horror, perhaps at its own limitations. I just cannot imagine how it could come to be that there is existence or essence — how there could be something instead of nothing. And the answer of Joseph Smith, that it did not come to be but simply always was, is marvelous — until I let the horror intrude.

Joseph Smith to the family of King Follett:

All the minds and spirits that God ever sent into the world
are susceptible of enlargement.

I know a young couple whose two-year old boy, because of cerebral palsy, is a spastic quadriplegic, apparently blind and deaf. His twin brother is per­fectly healthy. As a new high councilman, I gave a sacrament meeting sermon at my assigned ward on the grace of Christ, his unconditional love for sin­ners. Susan, the mother, came up, grateful for what I’d said and wanting to talk more about how she could cope with her struggles and feelings, her guilt about her son. What neglect had caused the fever in the hospital that pro­duced the palsy? Or, if a genetic “accident” was to blame, why had God allowed — or caused — it? Why had priesthood blessings that promised re­covery not yet been fulfilled? How could she go on holding Allyn almost twenty-four hours a day to keep him from bracing back and choking? How could she be forgiven for her anger at him, striking him, sometimes wanting him dead? I felt she needed most to rest and offered to hold Allyn while she had an undisturbed Sunday School hour with her husband. Then we talked later in the afternoon.

I wasn’t much comfort. I could testify about Christ’s understanding and unconditional acceptance of her and about the real benefits to her son of gain­ing a body, however imperfect now, and of feeling her love while he lived, however dimly. But I could not tell Susan I found Allyn’s trouble a blessing in disguise or evidence he was an especially righteous spirit who had volun­teered for such trouble or that he would be compensated in some extra way in the next life — that is, beyond the marvelous opportunity to grow and be tested in a normal body during the millennium. She listened, wept, disagreed, accepted some things. I offered our family to care for her twins occasionally so she and her husband could get away to rest and to renew their own rela­tionship, which had, she said, suffered.

Recently in her sacrament service, I heard Susan sing “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked” and more recently I heard her give a Spiritual Living lesson in Relief Society on apostasy, talking forthrightly about her own strug­gles with personal apostasy when priesthood blessings seemed to fail and when she felt unacceptable to God and unable to continue to endure. She warned her sisters to constant vigilance. I feel warned of two things: that holding little Allyn while Susan has an hour with her husband is at least as important as my words were and that she sings and teaches and bears her testimony more maturely and movingly now — and also continues to suffer while she endures.

In an interdisciplinary colloquium for freshmen I teach with four col­leagues, I’ve been learning about genetic problems that produce malforma­tions in children. As the sex cells divide, the complicated process of meiosis, by which the chromosomes are reduced from forty-eight to twenty-four, some­times produces broken and reattached parts — translocations — or duplica­tions in some eggs and sperm cells and, of course, missing or partial chromo­somes in their divided opposites. Many of these accidents (statistics all nicely predictable) are lethal, resulting after fertilization in miscarriages or still­births, but some produce living children. Down’s syndrome children are the result of such translocations, but there are also many others, rare but real, hidden away from our usual experience. The frequencies are surprising — 1 in every 700 births is Down’s syndrome (now being called trisomy 21 to clearly identify the problem and the chromosomes — a duplication or a seg­ment attachment to chromosome number 21, making it “three-bodied”). Jean de Grouchy’s Clinical Atlas of Human Chromosomes, which is amply illus­trated with photographs of the victims of chromosomal aberrations, is a kind of chamber of horrors of deformed, doomed children: cleft palates in Patau’s syndrome (1 in 5000 births), impossible flexion deformities in Edwards’s syn­drome (1 in 8000). In some texts a refrain comes at the end of each descrip­tion: “the mean survival time is about 23/2 months, 90 percent of all cases dying within a year” of birth, or “mean survival 3 months, 80 percent dying in the first year.” Is it a relief to know that most such terribly deformed chil­dren do not live long? But some do, with retardation, shortened, skewed limbs, grotesquely positioned fingers and toes, clubfeet.

The sex chromosomes, X and Y, most commonly cause abnormalities through duplications, though a missing X in females produces Turner’s syndrome: tiny body, sterility, low mathematics IQ, webbing on the neck. An extra X in men produces Klinefelter’s syndrome: some female body characteristics, sterility, low verbal IQ. Extra X’s can occur up to six, producing lower and lower IQ, but perhaps most trying to a believer in moral agency is the single extra Y in men, which produces a tall, powerful body and impulsive behavior that easily becomes anti-social. Victims of this chance occurrence in cell division (1 in 1000 births) have forty times the chance of others to end up in a penitentiary.

One syndrome, designated 5p monosomy (a missing part of chromosome 5), produces some facial and bone deformations and very severe retardation but not high fatality. Its deformation of the larynx produces a distinctive cry, like that of a kitten, which gives the syndrome its more common name, “cri du chat” — cry of the cat. What do parents endure when they first hear that cry from their newborn — and then as the years go and the cry diminishes and a characteristically wide-eyed, almost jawless face develops in a child who will live long, without language, with an IQ under twenty. If the figure 1 in 50,000 births is right there must be over 4000 sets of such parents in this coun­try, perhaps 80,000 in the world.

A few months ago we read, with surprising calm it seems to me, of the parents inBloomington,Indiana, who were able to get medical and legal sup­port for a decision not to perform the difficult but feasible surgery needed to save their Down’s syndrome child — designated “Infant Doe.” Their lawyer called it “treatment to do nothing.” Columnist George Will called it homicide. Since the case apparently would not have been filed—probably not allowed— if the child had not had Down’s syndrome, the logic of the decision suggests that parents have the right to kill through neglect — and why not more directly? — a child that they decide is a huge trouble. And surely, then, it would seem society must have the right to relieve itself of those who come to us through “wrongful birth,” the tortured phrase that has developed in recent litigation aimed at doctors whose advice or decisions leads to safe delivery of severely deformed or retarded babies who could have been aborted. So far the courts have been willing only to assess the doctors the costs for care of such “wrongful births” — not to establish punitive damages.

I know of a couple whose first baby was born with a gaping cleft lip, the eyes squeezed almost into a cyclops, no muscle tone, and profound retarda­tion. It lived ten days, requiring very expensive care at enormous cost to the parents. A chromosomal check available in recent years revealed the mother to be a carrier of trisomy 13, Patau’s syndrome, and the doctors presented the options: no more children except by adoption, amniocentesis in future preg­nancies to check the chromosomes of the fetus and abortion in case of abnor­mality, or having children with a high percentage of carriers and abnormali­ties. On the basis of their opposition to birth control and abortion (and thus to amniocentesis that would assume abortion as an option), and with faith in an optimistic priesthood blessing and strengthened by the fasting of their ward and stake, the couple went ahead with another child. It was born with trisomy 13, lived thirty-three days, and put the parents in debt over $100,000.

Jesus Christ to Joseph Smith:

Fear not even unto death; for in this world your joy is not full,
but in me your joy is full.

A year ago while we were inEngland,Charlottelearned that her mother, Josephine Johnson Hawkins, had cancer of the pancreas. There was an exploratory operation. The decision was not for the dangerous surgery or trau­matic chemotherapy that had little chance of helping but for a peaceful final few months. WhenCharlottecame home in July she found her mother wasted but still hoping: she had had a blessing, she said, that she would recover. Charlotte decided to do what could be done, found a doctor willing to do limited chemotherapy, brought her mother to her own bed (I moved to a cot in my study), and together with her sisters set about making Josephine well. They cooked tempting food to keep up her appetite against the nausea of painkillers, bathed her, and helped her to the bathroom (finally carrying her) to avoid the discomfort of bedpans.Charlottewas determined and the doctor encouraging until one day in late August when he saw that the chemotherapy was just not working and stopped it. Josephine told me she thought she could have the faith to make the promise work, but there was so much pain and she was so tired.Charlottekept trying, fiercely believing in the promise, hoping. Our daughters lay on the bed with Josephine, held her in their arms and talked about canning apricots with her years ago. She died on October 2. The last month she slowly turned a deep golden color from the jaundice.

I have long thought that Josephine Hawkins took too much onto herself, keeping her own hurts inside, interceding for others in potential conflicts, absorbing others’ weaknesses, letting any damage be done to her feelings, let­ting mercy rob justice. The internal stress she invited may well have brought on her cancer and killed her, and I felt for a long time she was foolish. But I decided in that last month that she was right. And she was also right about jokes. She never could get the punchlines straight and always marred a funny story in the telling so that the humor came against herself, rather than who­ever was the butt of the joke. I used to be condescendingly amused, merely tolerant, but I’ve decided she felt intuitively that nearly every joke is at some­one’s expense. She took the expense. I think she was right to do so, whatever the cost.

Since last fallCharlottehasn’t slept well. She wonders about that promise to her mother and about fighting to hold on so long, prolonging the pain, straining her bonds with her sisters. And she takes the children’s troubles more onto herself and doesn’t tell jokes very well.

Christ describing the last days to his apostles just before leaving them:

Then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and
shall hate one another. And because iniquity shall abound,
the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall
endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

On13 May 1981, an attempt was made on the Pope’s life at his public audience in Saint Peter’s Square. I was in the throng, next to his car, just reaching out to touch his hand. My mind formed clearly two partly visual, mostly verbal images: first, John Paul II, a man of God, is shot, hurting ter­ribly, will die; and second,Poland’s Solidarity, which this man inspirited, and Lech Walesa, to whom this man conveyed symbolic spiritual power, are fin­ished. When I learned that night on the train away fromRomethat the Pope had survived I knew it was a miracle — for him and forPoland. I learned of another miracle in the summer when the Polish military leaders, by refusing to use force against fellow Poles, apparently prevented the Communist Party from destroying Solidarity. In the fall I began to wake in the night and think about the coming winter. WithPoland’s economic problems still unsolved because of the continuing power struggle, I knew that hunger could defeat Solidarity. Food riots could justify internal suppression or external interven­tion. Another miracle was needed. Those images of the Pope and Walesa returned. I couldn’t sleep.

Finally I began to explore. I found that most people felt deep concern and admiration for Solidarity and wanted to help but didn’t know how. Agencies like Catholic Relief Services and Polish National Alliance were sending food but not enough and were not doing large-scale publicity that might attract help from non-Catholics and non-Poles. Through Michael Novak, a Catholic lay theologian who had met inRomewith Solidarity leaders, I was able to get in contact, by phone toWarsaw, with Bronislaw Geremek, chief advisor to Solidarity. He said the children were starting to die of dysentery. He asked that we send dried milk, detergents, and technicians to help them build pri­vately controlled small businesses and that we do it soon, by plane. We orga­nized Food For Poland, a non-profit public foundation for tax-free contribu­tions and had a planeload of food and arrangements almost ready for donated flight when martial law was declared December 13.

All flights were grounded. Geremek was one of the first arrested (I saw his name on a list in Time on Christmas day) and from a letter smuggled out later we learned he went on a hunger strike in January and then was punished with an unheated room. Our government cut off its aid and vacillated on private aid like ours. We weren’t certain food would get through. Finally it became clear through messages fromPoland and successful shipments fromWestern Europe that the military was not interfering; our State Department gave approval and on January 6 we sent our first shipment, by truck, then train and Polish ship toGdansk. Since then we have sponsored a National Day of Fasting, made five more shipments of food, medicine, clothing, deter­gents, and sent one of our trustees along with one plane load to Warsaw to verify first-hand the proper distribution to those most in need. Our national director went a few weeks ago toGdansk to observe distribution of our largest shipment, which included 90,000 pounds of milk from theLDSChurch.

We have been responsible for adding perhaps $ 1 million worth of supplies to the Polish Relief effort. That is pitifully little — the equivalent of one extra good meal for the three million Polish children, aged, and families of im­prisoned Solidarity members who are in greatest need. Our government cut off $800 million in aid just for this year. And I am convinced that perhaps twice that much, invested one year ago in a massive Marshall Plan to Poland, focused on improving farming efficiency and on building small privately con­trolled industries and businesses, would have provided enough economic resur­gence and enough return to Poland’s traditional productivity to enable Soli­darity’s nonviolent success and a gradual development of basic freedoms. But now the stalemate drags on. Someone tried to kill the Pope again, one year later, this time with a bayonet.Polandis not in the news, and people don’t think much now about helping.

During January and February I woke very early each morning, thinking of the mistakes I was making as an English professor trying to raise funds, the missed opportunities, inept public relations — not enough hard-nosed pushi-ness, not quick enough tough-minded assessment of how we were being used by others to their own advantage. I thought of the people I met each day or talked to on the phone who could give $1 million easily but didn’t, or the families who fasted and sent all they could, but only once, or students and faculty who helped a while and then disappeared. And I lay awake thinking of Bronislaw Geremek in his cold cell, of thousands of families with father or mother or both interned or dismissed from jobs — knowing we were failing them. I thought of a film I saw in December made by a French journalist of an interview with Lech Walesa held just a few days before the December 13 crackdown. Walesa sat holding his daughter, with a portrait of John Paul II in the background. He said, “I must remember that even if my dream of a freePolandis achieved, it could be taken away in a day. Disaster can come anytime, as it has in the past. I must be ready for death. I could die at any time and must be prepared while I continue to work.”

Recently we’ve decided we may have to discontinue Food For Poland before long. We’ve failed to get major corporation or foundation support or the help of a popular entertainment figure — both of which seem necessary to keep up momentum. And I am ready to admit I do not have the gifts — or the stomach — to make a career of fundraising. I do not lie awake much any more. When I do it’s usually to hold Charlotte, who sometimes has bad dreams. We get up very early and, as the days begin to shorten, play tennis for a half hour in the cool shadow of Y Mount.

And for the first time in over a year I’ve begun occasionally to let the fear of being slip into my mind. Sometimes I look up from a book or the type­writer and the world is only whirling quanta of energy, reflecting all its seduc­tive impressions of color from a palsied and blank universe. If I let it (some­times I invite it), the horror deepens, because neither that atomized, inertial, spinning chaos nor my strange ability to sense and order and anguish over it have any real reason to exist. I want to take refuge in the mystery that an absolute God made it all out of nothing and will make sense of it or send it back to nothing, but Joseph Smith will not let me. There must be opposition or no existence. Is it more difficult or easier to take my problems to a God who has problems?

Nephi bidding farewell to his people:

Ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life.Postscript: December 1982

In September, at the equinox, I was called to be bishop of a newly formed student ward. I have stewardship of 120 young couples, most already begin­ning to have children. The first thing the Lord told me, when I began to think and pray about staffing the ward, as clearly as I have ever been told anything, was to call Susan as my Relief Society president: to be in charge of all the women, their religious instruction, their compassionate service, their sisterhood, their training as wives and mothers. It made no sense: Susan was still bur­dened greatly by her struggles with Allyn, with her husband, with herself. Dale had left school to cope with their enormous financial burdens and was planning to move them toSaltLake. But the call was clear and they accepted.

Susan immediately visited every family and established the crucial founda­tion for making a ward community. She has opened herself and her life en­tirely to her sisters and conducts all her interviews, her meetings, her casual conversations with the same absolute honesty and down-to-earth forthrightness. The women — and their husbands — experience quite directly the struggles, the ups and downs of anguish and hope, the need for help, and the enduring courage through which she lives day by day.

I’ve tried to be that open and direct as a pastor. I speak for a few minutes in nearly every sacrament meeting, very personally, about the realities of my life withCharlotte, our sorrows, our decisions, our faith, and I teach the family relations class each Sunday for all the newlyweds in the ward. I spend many hours with people in trouble: couples who have hurt each other until they can’t speak, lonely husbands, burdened with past sins and present insecurity, women who can’t have children, and women who are having too many. I talk about the problems Charlotte and I have had, how we have hurt each other and suffered and learned and got help and endured. How the Lord has directed us from place to place across the country — toward unforeseeable service and learning and away from ambition for luxury and prestige. I call people to the regular positions but also to special assignments: a couple to help take care of Allyn in sacrament meeting, another to work with an alcoholic living in our area separated from his family. I see people changing, marriages beginning to work again, people helping without being called, people making moral decisions — to pay income tax on tips from years back, not to sue some­one who has wronged them. I see Susan, now three months pregnant, smiling often.

Reality is too demanding for me to feel very safe any more in the appalling luxury of my moments of utter skepticism. God’s tears in the book of Moses, at which the prophet Enoch wondered, tell me that God has not resolved the mystery of being. But he endures in love. He does not ask me to forego my integrity by ignoring the mystery or he would not have let Enoch see him weep. But he does not excuse me to forego my integrity by ignoring the reality which daily catches me up in joy and sorrow and shows me, slowly, subtly, its moral patterns of iron delicacy.

Food For Poland has continued. We have been accused of glory-seeking, of being liberals indulging in do-goodism instead of the true religion of doc­trinal purity, and by some of being traitors: giving aid to the enemy in time of war. But we are sending, in cooperation with the LDS Welfare Program, another large shipment of food and clothing to help the Poles through this winter.Charlotte’s father, after a year of trying it alone, will be coming to live with us soon. Our third daughter, who was born with a diaphragmatic hernia and who almost died from a resulting intestine block last June, while she was on a mission — came home, was operated on, slowly recovered, and is going back into the field in January. Our oldest daughter is in love. I lie awake sometimes now, as the nights begin to shorten, my mind besieged by woe and wonder.

Edgar to his blind father in King Lear:

Men must endure Their going hence even as their
coming hither. Ripeness is all. Come on.

]]>http://www.eugeneengland.org/enduring/feed1Soft Launch of New Eugene England Foundation Websitehttp://www.eugeneengland.org/soft-launch-of-new-eugene-england-foundation-website
http://www.eugeneengland.org/soft-launch-of-new-eugene-england-foundation-website#commentsSat, 08 Oct 2011 15:05:47 +0000http://www.eugeneengland.org/?p=714We are excited to share with all the new look and feel of this Eugene England Foundation website. Soft launching 8 October 2011, this new website will offer many new features, including HTML versions of most of Eugene England’s writings, many new pictures, copies of letters and journal entries, more audio and video of Eugene England “in action,” a new section of reflections by friends and colleagues that tell stories and offer insight into Gene at various parts of his life, and much more.

What you are seeing now is just the beginning. Come back everyday! Tons of new stuff will be added in the coming weeks as we head for a full launch before Thanksgiving.